Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

110 Notes
given in some way or other. It would be necessary to assume either that the criterion may be found in
some property of ideas, in which case the criticism offered in the text is valid, or else that the criterion
is known in some other way, in which case there would be an infinite regress. Conventionalists, such as
Dingler, are aware of this fact; but they go wrong when they say that it constitutes a reductio ad absurdum
of a properly conceived theory of the evident and when they speak of the resulting “collapse of science”.
57 Husserl’s polemic against construing the evident in terms of a feeling (Logische Untersuchungen,
Vol. I, Section 49, and Vol. II, Section 39) may be traced back to these observations. See the
Introduction to the present book.
58 This entire passage is of fundamental importance in connection with the theory of truth and the
theory of the evident. See note 5 5.
59 Brentano is far from wanting to deny that the defects of language have had unfortunate results
upon theorizing about logic. His logic note-books contain a voluminous chapter about the dangers
of language in its effect upon our thinking. The remark in the text is concerned only with cases that
Sigwart discusses, which are not appropriate examples.
60 Meinong defended the concept of “evident surmises”. See Brentano’s Versuch über die Erkenntnis,
p. 209.
PART TWO (References 1 to 28)
1 In the course of his correspondence on the problem of the formation of general concepts,
Brentano had attempted to formulate a law which would indicate the relative nature of all simple
concepts. He had accepted the traditional doctrine which holds that such words as “Size”, “Redness”,
“Equality”, etc., are logical names, i.e., that they signify concepts. But since redness cannot be
conceived except as the redness of something, Brentano taught that “redness” (Röte) and “thing
having redness” (Röte-Habendes) are correlative pairs of concepts. Since “Redness”, “Colour”,
“Size” and the like are nothing but the Aristotelian forms (“it is by virtue of their largeness that
large things are large”), the theory could be considered only as one type of attempt to justify the
Aristotelian theory. Each of the Aristotelian forms has as its correlate that which has the form. A
set of questions raised by Marty caused Brentano to revise this theory. The result appears in the
text. See also Brentano: Aristoteles und seine Weltanschauung, pp. 46 ff. (“Ursprung der Ideen”),
and A.Marty: Die “logische” usw. Kasustheorien, pp. 93 ff. Compare Part III, note 44 below.
The sprachkritische reform, initiated by this letter of 1901, is one of the most significant achievements
in epistemology and should be capable of settling the conflict between nominalism and realism.
See the references to Vaihinger’s radical theory of fictions in the index of the Psychologie,
Vol. II.
2 In other words, there is no such thing as “space” or “time”; there is only “the spatial” and “the
temporal”. And there is no “virtue”, but there are “the virtuous”. See Vols. II and III of the Psychologie,
and section 21 of the following selection.
3 “Man”, “animal”, “stone”, “house”, and the like, signify concepts; but the grammatical abstracta
and synsemantica (“humanity”, “size”, “form”, ‘justice”, “beauty”) do not. See the appendix of Vol.
III of the Psychologie.
4 “Indicating what we have in mind” (Anzeigen, was wir im Gemüte hegen) is what Marty called
the “secondary intention” of the speaker. He took the “primary intention” to be that of producing a
certain mental event in the listener. The primary intention of using a name would be to call up an
idea; that of making a statement would be to produce a judgement; and that of coaxing, ordering, or
requiring would be to produce certain feelings or emotions. Some of Brentano’s discussions of the
purpose of language are similar to the views of Marty. See Marty’s Untersuchungen, etc., Halle 1908.