Phenomenology

Abstract

The turn from idealism to realism that we have seen in Great Britain and the United States in the early twentieth century was foreshadowed on the continent in the work of Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Through one of his most famous students, Alexius Meinong, Brentano’s work was, as reported in the last chapter, influential in the development of British neo-realism. Brentano’s realism, however, differs from the common sense realism of Moore and Russell. Brentano was a Roman Catholic priest and a leader of the unsuccessful opposition to the 1870 proclamation of papal infallibility. In 1873, he left the priesthood, the Church and his position on the faculty at Würzburg. He was appointed Professor at the University of Vienna in 1874, but his status as a married ex-priest led him to resign his professorship in 1880. He remained at Vienna as a Privatdozent until 1895 when he retired to Florence. Brentano knew the work of Comte and was an admirer of the British empirical philosophers. Nevertheless, he retained his allegiance to the realism of Aristotle and the medieval philosophers, and developed through a critical reassessment of this tradition an alternative to the Neo-Kantianism of his time. In a posthumously published book, On the Existence of God, Brentano appealed to the traditional arguments from motion and contingency to argue for the high probability that God exists. He also argued for a concept of God more subject to the temporal process than the God of classical theism.