The first perspective uses a narrow focus on the School itself. Instead of starting “top down” from the abstract and general question of principle whether the students of Brentano formed a school and whether this group had the required degree of unity and coherence, I propose to begin from the “bottom up”: can we find at least one thing they all agreed on and continued to agree on? If so, this might constitute a crystallization point around which more moments of unity can accrete, a core belief of the group such that we might call it a core tenet of a school. I propose that this can be found in their philosophy of mathematics and can be tied to several other core issues in the School, including symbolic intentionality as well as their philosophy of science and epistemology. In this way, I hope to show their unity as a school by focusing on a very specific and particular issue.

The other perspective I would like to offer is achieved by broadening the focus instead. It is instructive to compare Brentano’s specific interpretation of the idea (or ideal) of “philosophy as science” with others who formulated this idea in a similar, but different way. A promising target for this comparison is Friedrich Paulsen, who, like Brentano, also studied under Trendelenburg and explicitly advocated the idea of philosophy as science in his influential Introduction to Philosophy. Paulsen moreover was a colleague of Stumpf in Berlin and Husserl’s first teacher in philosophy.

The members of the School of Brentano were quite aware of the fact that the status of “philosophy as science” was more than simply a rallying cry or a slogan launched by Brentano and endorsed uncritically by his students, but a shared issue that needed to be worked on. This means refining it together as well as distinguishing it from other approaches. It is not just the case that the very idea of “philosophy as science,” and specifically the idea that “philosophy uses the same method as the natural sciences,” distinguishes the School of Brentano toto coelo from German Idealism, but also, more subtly, the specific interpretation and how it was worked out in detail by Brentano’s students, distinguishes their shared position from other conceptions of “philosophy as science”, such as Paulsen’s.

In my presentation “A Brentanist Framework for Symbolic Intentionality & Symbolic Technologies” I will outline my research programme for the coming years, which is centred on the notion of symbolic intentionality and its application in symbolic technologies. I will begin by briefly explaining this notion, which finds its origin in the School of Brentano, and then outline how it can be used to build a framework that is broadly applicable to systems for symbol manipulation both mental and mechanical.

The idea of symbolic intentionality was introduced precisely at the time when logic and mathematics were becoming mechanised and we were able to delegate our mental labor to cognitive tools such as calculators and computers. However, the Brentanist framework is not limited to these contemporaneous developments, but also covers current developments in Artificial Intelligence. Indeed many of the issues raised in the School of Brentano are still or again being raised now: how is it at all possible to delegate mental processes to machines? Can we trust the results of mechanical symbol manipulation epistemically and ethically?

Yet the question remains why we would use a 19th century theory to approach and answer such questions. As I will show, how the mind and how machines use signs and symbols are issues that originate in 19th century paradigms in psychology and mathematics. The School of Brentano is the nexus where these issues come together and can be appropriately tackled, because Brentano and his students combined their scientific psychology with a philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and a logic both in the sense of a formal system for reasoning as well as a general theory of science. This makes them uniquely suited to develop both an account of symbolic intentionality as well as an account of symbolic technologies.

The programme builds on two breakthroughs in my research: the reconstruction of the Brentanist philosophy of mathematics (Ierna 2011, 2017, 2021, 2022) and the new approach to intentionality (Ierna 2012, 2015, 2018, 2023). The innovative element lies in the combination of the concept of symbolic intentionality and the philosophy of mathematics in the School of Brentano and its application to the mechanisation of mathematics and logic in the 19th century. This would lead to a third breakthrough: a Brentanist philosophy of computation. This requires teasing out the relation between symbolic intentionality and symbolic technologies as I will try to outline in my talk.

One of the reasons for the fertile ground in Munich and for the origination of the phenom- enological movement precisely there, was that here there was a generally congenial atmos- phere. Throughout the years the people in Munich, more than at any other German university, had engaged very positively with Brentano and his School; i. e. with that circle of thinkers to which Husserl himself also belonged. (Schuhmann 1988, 97)

As well as in the British Isles:

Before World War I the interest in Husserl’s phenomenology was overshadowed by that in Franz Brentano, promoted chiefly by the analytical psychology of G. F. Stout, and in Alexius Meinong, stirred by Bertrand Russell’s three articles in Mind (1906). (Spiegelberg 1982, 662)

Did something similar occur across the pond in North America or were the background and context completely different? Was there a similar previous reception of Brentano and his school that facilitated the subsequent uptake of phenomenology? In the chapter I discuss the possible role of some of the competing elements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that favored and opposed the spread and flourishing of phenomenology in North America. Despite significant German influences, North America was not receptive to phenomenology in the beginning. The dominant philosophical orientation was first and foremost that of German Idealism and while philosophy and psychology were closely connected, the prevailing imported approaches of Wundt and Herbart were not congenial for the reception of Brentano and Husserl. The reaction against idealism in the US gave origin to various strands of “New Realism” and “Critical Realism”. Husserl’s work was initially taken up in the context of these debates, with limited interest in the original contributions of his phenomenological method. A clear indication for the early reception of Husserl is provided in the earliest book-length treatment of the School of Brentano in the US: Helen Huss Parkhurst’s dissertation “Recent Logical Realism.” Here Husserl is quite straightforwardly recruited as support for Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie in the context of the local debates on realism.

our chronology of modern realism might better take its start with the year 1901, the date of the preface to the first edition of Meinong’s Über Annahmen, which inaugurated the modern phase of Platonic or subsistential realism. (Parkhurst 1930, 46)

Husserl is seen merely as a stepping stone in crossing the Atlantic, from Meinong, through Moore and Russell, to the American debates on realism, and not as forging an entirely new, alternative path into phenomenology.

The traditional interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality has been distorted by the inflationary use of one single quotation from his 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, which uses the expression “intentional inexistence”. By considering other sources we can see more clearly what his account really amounted to. In his lectures and letters we find passages that explicitly and unambiguously identify the immanent object, the intentional object, and the correlate of an act. These turn out to be merely perspectival distinctions, not separate parts or independent things. The most fundamental perspective in Brentano is that of internal perception. In internal perception it is clear that the phenomena that I experience, as phenomena, are always part of my mental acts, which are then merely mistaken as independent objects from another perspective. This mistake leads to ontologizing either the transcendent object or the immanent object and taking it as something it is not. All we have in intentional acts is a content, there cannot be any independent objects (in the proper sense of the word) inside or outside of us.

Intentionality then is not a relation between two independent objects or substances, but rather a correlation of a mental act and its dependent, immanent correlate: the content. This leads to the seemingly radical conclusion that there are no mind-independent objects. Transcendently directed acts conceive their contents as external objects, but “objects” are always “objects of an act” and exist only insofar they are part of and wholly dependent on the mind. Without loss of meaning we can use a less misleading expression, such as content, instead. This avoids any talk of “objects” existing either inside or outside the mind and stresses that we do not straightforwardly perceive “objects” at all, but merely interpret bundles of perceptions as “objects”.

The conclusion will be that all objects are intentional in the proper sense, i.e. contents of an act, i.e. correlates of an act, i.e. dependent on the mind. They are therefore not at all what is usually understood by “object” – as opposed to “subject” – namely something that exists separately and independently of consciousness. There is no such thing like an “intentional object” and we should avoid using the term “object” in discussions about intentionality, because it is extremely misleading.

I am very glad to announce that together with Robin Rollinger we finally managed to publish a translation of an article by Karl Schuhmann “Phenomenological Ontology in the Work of Herbert Spiegelberg: Ideas and (Ontic and Deontic) States of Affairs” (originally written in German with the title “Idee, Sachverhalt und Sollverhalt. Die Ontologie Herbert Spiegelbergs”). It is available on-line at Phenomenological Investigations.

This translation also has had some difficulties getting published. It was at first prepared and intended for the volume The Reception of Husserlian Phenomenology in North America. This collection was originally envisioned as consisting of two volumes and the translation was announced in my contribution on Herbert Spiegelberg to the first volume as to appear in the second volume, but the plans to publish a second volume were later abandoned.

A central source for Spiegelberg’s position is his 1937 work Sollen und Dürfen (“Ought and May”), which remained unpublished until Schuhmann’s 1989 edition. The present translation is one of the most in-depth analyses of Spiegelberg’s ethical thought by someone who was not only intimately familiar with the content, but also a good friend and collaborator. Besides editing Sollen und Dürfen, Schuhmann also collaborated with Spiegelberg on the third edition of The Phenomenological Movement, and is acknowledged in various works as a friend and collaborator. In “Ontic and Deontic States of Affairs”, Schuhmann takes up not only some of the fundamental themes spanning Spiegelberg’s life-long quest for a phenomenological ethics and theory of value, but particularly does so by taking into account and integrating Spiegelberg’s early works on the topic. Spiegelberg’s early book-length treatments of ethical topics were never translated into English and perhaps for this reason he is nowadays known mainly as the historian of the phenomenological movement. We hope that this translation of Schumann’s article can also serve as an introduction and stimulus for a wider readership concerning Spiegelberg’s ethical quest.

We are very grateful to Elisabeth Schuhmann and Roland Schuhmann for the kindly conceded permission to translate this article from the unpublished manuscripts of Karl Schuhmann, to Piet Steenbakkers and Cees Leijenhorst for their support, Charlene Elsby and Phenomenological Investigations for providing a space for this work to finally appear in print, and Patrick Flack at SDVIG press for the quick processing and formatting so that the article could be available this weekend. 

(For those who would like to know more about Karl Schuhmann, a biography and bibliography of Schuhmann are available for free in the front and back matter of his Selected Papers)