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This ‘Introduction to Brentano ’ is primarily aimed at conceptual interpretation even though it has been written with scrupulous regard to the texts and sets out its topics according to their chronological development. I have concerned myself at length with historical questions on other occasions, as when editing the Italian versions of the three volumes of Brentano ’s published by Laterza in 1997. Again for Laterza, and in accompaniment to the , I have written a short Introduzione a Brentano (Introduction to Brentano) of which this book is the development.

The figure of Franz Brentano appears in an oddly shifting light when one reads university chronicles and newspaper articles of his time, family accounts, and the memoirs of his pupils. For his detractors he was an ecclesiastic and a relic from the Middle Ages; for the Catholic Church a rebellious heterodox in odour of Ultramontanism. His most implacable enemies, Husserl tells us, even went so far as to call him, variously, a Jesuit in disguise, a prattler, a Pharisee, a sophist, and a scholastic.

The nineteenth century saw an Aristotelian ‘renaissance’. A movement of mainly German origin, its protagonists produced a series of critical editions of Aristotle ’s works accompanied by commentaries and philological and conceptual analyses. A leading role in the revival was played by the Academy of Berlin, which supported publication of the critical edition of Aristotle’s works, the first two volumes of which were edited by Bekker (1831), while 1870 saw publication of edited by Bonitz. In two years, from 1847 to 1849, two editions of Aristotle’s were also published, one edited by Schwegler (1847-48), the other by Bonitz (1848-49).

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, psychology and philosophy stood in a very close relationship, although it was not always an untroubled one. They did so especially in the German-speaking countries, as testified by the so-called , which involved several schools.

Psychophysics sheds light on one of the key problems of psychology as a science, namely the applicability of mathematics to the measurement of psychic phenomena, an issue which had also been addressed, but left unresolved, by Kant. But as the question entered the realm of the exact sciences it carried with it the traces of metaphysical disputes.

, known as II, was f rst published in German in 1911. By that time, as mentioned, Brentano had spent sixteen years in Italy, where he took up permanent residence in Florence.

The further five Appendices to II which Kraus appended to the 1924 edition were dictated by Brentano, now afflicted by blindness, in the years between 1915 and 1917. They therefore relate to the last three years of his life. Because of the further conceptual changes apparent in them, here they will be treated separately from the previous ones, together with the writings that form the third volume of Brentano’s psychology from an empirical standpoint: published posthumously in 1928.

The analyses conducted in previous chapters have shown that Brentano’s descriptive psychology, in all its ramifications, always maintained a twofold valence between and . In the last years of Brentano’s life, these two aspects merged into a metaphysical theory which on the one hand constituted a philosophical variation (in effect, a reversal) of Aristotle’s position on the problem of substance and accidents, which was due to specification of the concept of , while on the other it maintained the scientific, empirical and experimental thrust of the Appendixes to II and the various texts collected in III.

In the light of the foregoing discussion, and on the basis of the texts available – and therefore with a certain degree of caution – we may now address a number of concluding questions on Brentano’s thought.

It is the general opinion that Brentano’s theories do not constitute a system, and that they do not do so substantially for two reasons: firstly because events in Brentano’s personal life prevented him, at least in part, from giving systematicity to his writings; secondly because it was not his intention to construct a system in the manner of German idealism. However, this is not to say that Brentano did not seek to on the basis of a very specific point of view – that of the given in presentation and the other classes of psychic phenomena – manifest in all his works. Brentano’s endeavour to give a descriptive psychological foundation to metaphysics is also evident in those of his writings where he deals with ethics, aesthetics, language, and law, and which formed further components of his