Intentionality, Brentano, and Bain’s Psychology
Federico Boccaccini (FNRS/University of Liege)
Franz Brentano (1838–1917), in his influential book Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint (1874), famously resurrected the notion of intentionality. Commentators have paid
great attention to this concept’s historical sources, i.e. Aristotle and medieval philosophy of
mind, in order to analyse it and justify its restoration. Unfortunately, they often ignore the fact
that Book Two of the text—devoted to the concept of mental phenomena in general and
within which Brentano enunciates his theory of intentional reference as a mark of the
mental—is, first and foremost, a sophisticated and brilliant response to the philosophical
psychology of its time, particularly to Alexander Bain’s psychological work and his theory of
psychophysical parallelism. There are many undervalued references to the work of Bain in
Brentano’s book, and also to other Scottish philosophers like Reid, Brown, and Hamilton. My
paper aims to highlight the direct connection between Bain and the renewal of the doctrine of
intentionality of thought by Brentano. My claim is that the puzzle of intentionality should be
approached and studied in its real historical context, noting the impact of Scottish philosophy
of mind on 19th-century German psychology. I argue that 1) Brentano’s theory of
intentionality and his strong anti-naturalism in psychology is a straight reaction to Bain’s
seminal work The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and its companion volume Emotions and
the Will (1859); and that 2) Brentano’s concepts of empiricism and scientific method in
psychology are elaborated as a variation of Bain’s.
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Maja Vasiljevic
University of Belgrade
Mikhail (Mykhailo) Minakov
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Juraj Marušiak
Slovak Academy of Sciences
John Barry
Queen's University Belfast
