Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

2
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE ERRONEOUS
DOCTRINE OF ENTIA IRREALIA.
(Notes taken by A.Kastil after a conversation with
Brentano. Innsbruck, May 1914)
How I arrived at the erroneous thought of the existence of the non-real.
1. Following Aristotle, I realized that the “is” of the existential statement “A is” is not
attributive and does not involve a predicate, in the strict sense. “Is”, therefore, is a word
which is merely synsemantic.
2. Then I noted that “is” may also be used in such statements as “There is the impossibility
of a round square” and “That there are no round squares is something that is”. These are
the cases where, according to Aristotle, the “is” is used for “Being in the sense of the true”
17
Hence there is already a temptation to believe that the word “is” has the same function
in the two cases (for example, in “A thing is”, and in “An impossibility is”); for in the one
case as in the other, it is merely synsemantic and not attributive.
3. But perhaps I would not have been led to the view, had I not been confirmed in it
by a passage in Thomas Aquinas, whom I then thought of as my teacher. Thomas has
the curious doctrine, quite alien to Aristotle, that things are composed of essentia and
existentia—created things, that is, and not God. In the case of God essentia and existentia
are identical.
Now Thomas himself raises an objection. We can know only the existence of God and
not his essence; how, then, could his essence and existence be the same? Thomas answers:
we do not know the existence of God, in the strict sense; when we say “Deus est”, the “is”
refers, not to the real existence of God, but to the “being in the sense of the true”—the ens
tamquam verum. 18
He thus assumed that the “is” has the same function in both types of case (“God is” and
“There is the impossibility of so and so”).
But this was by no means Aristotle’s view. To be sure, the “is” functions only
synsemantically in each case, but from this it does not follow that “is” performs the same
function in each case.
If Aristotle holds that “is” in “There is the impossibility of a round square” pertains to
being in the sense of the true, he does not hold this of the “is” in “Socrates is”. In the latter
case, it indicates the affirmation or acknowledgement of Socrates; but in the former it says
that whoever asserts that the thing is impossible thinks correctly. Hence Aristotle says that
this being in the sense of the true is to be found only in our mind. What is accepted or
affirmed is not the impossibility of a round square, but, at most, the person who denies or