Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Notes 101
him” (Präludien, p. iv), goes far beyond the historical Kant by allowing him neither a Ptolemaic nor a
Copernican conception of truth; he would have Kant reject every version of the correspondence theory.
With a much finer touch than that of the Marburg Neo-Kantians, Windelband would have truth consist in
thought which accords with a normative rule (p. 114); “the mind brings this norm to its own awareness.”
Windelband writes (Präludien, p. 47): “The only thing that philosophy can do is to extract this normative
consciousness from the flux of our empirical consciousness and to rely upon direct evidence;
it is in this direct evidence that the normative consciousness, once it has been brought to light, has the
efficacy and validity which it ought to have for every individual.” There is little to quarrel with in this
statement, unless one takes too seriously the contention that it is “the only thing that philosophy can do”.
All this is certainly fraught with confusion, if “judging” is not distinguished from “thinking about”,
and if the logical ought is identified with the axiological and ethical ought. But this aberration from
the intellectual to the emotional, against which Brentano correctly protests in the fourth essay, does
show that Windelband looked for the norm—that which is as it ought to be—in consciousness itself.
And in doing this he was following the path which, indeed, Spinoza had taken before him (Ethics, II,
prop. 43); see the review by Oskar Kraus of Cohen’s writings on philosophy and the theory of knowledge
in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, No. 30 (1929). To be sure, one still finds traces of the doctrine of
correspondence in Spinoza, but Freudenthal conceives these traces as being no more than a gesture
towards the venerable principle. Here too Spinoza bases his thought on that of Descartes.
Unfortunately, Windelband and his circle, having set out in the right direction, soon become lost in
the chimerical realm of absolute values and validities.
But Brentano, at the time of his lecture on truth, tried merely to modify the correspondence theory.
Later he saw that this would not do either. The theory of the evident, which Brentano was one of the
first to revive, has been developed to the point where it clarifies the concept of truth, and removes
the attendant difficulties, without resort to the fiction of ideal objects, “eternal realms of value”, and
the other non-things which serve only to restore the correspondence theory in some form or other.
3 Compare Brentano’s criticism of Sigwart’s doctrine in Essay V.
4 Franz Hillebrand in Grünhut’s Zeitschrift für das Öffentlich- und Privatrecht (1884, XI, p. 633).
5 Cf. Franz Brentano, Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburg
1862), p. 22.
6 Compare the new edition of Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Felix Meiner,
Philosophische Bibliothek, Vols. I–III, esp. Vol. II.
7 On the so-called “existential judgement”, see Brentano’s Psychologie, II (pp. 55, 195). Compare
also Franz Hillebrand, Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen Schlüsse (Vienna 1891); see notes 25
and 38, below.
8 Brentano later withdrew the assertion that collections of things, and parts of things, are not
themselves things. A boundary or limit is indeed not a thing on its own, but it is a thing which exists
as part of a continuous thing.
9 Brentano later attacks the doctrine. Everyone calls a house or a chair a”thing”, although it is
considered as a joining together of many things (bricks, pieces of wood, etc.). Certainly the old
doctrine is correct in holding that a collection—a herd or an army, for example—is not something
that may be added to the particular soldiers or sheep as still another entity; it is a real totality in the
sense of a sum whose parts likewise consist of real things.
10 Brentano held at that time that “a past pain”, “a former man”, “a future man”, and the like,
are expressions in which the adjective functions as a modifier converting a thing into a non-thing.
Most of Brentano’s students have remained faithful to this doctrine or have further elaborated
upon it, extending the realm of non-things into that of the boundless. Husserl’s phenomenology
and Meinong’s theory of objects both tended to propagate this realm of irrealia to an extravagant
degree. But Marty and Stumpf were content to defend the traditional stock of irrealia—“non-real
things”, “essences”, “states of affairs”, “contents”—against Brentano’s repudiation of non-things. So
far as “past” and “future” are concerned, Brentano’s later doctrine was that differences of praeterital