Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

126 Notes
4 Brentano’s hope of leading Husserl back to the proper path was illusory. Husserl made no attempt
to reply to these arguments, but concerned himself instead with more and more devices designed
to rescue the universality of knowledge; one needs only to think of the “pure consciousness”.
5 Theoretical logic is what Husserl usually calls “pure logic”.
6 According to Brentano, all axiomatic knowledge is purely negative; there is no raison d’être for
any scientific endeavour which is concerned only with the acquisition of such knowledge. To have
any claim on the interests of research, a discipline must lead us to positive knowledge of the world.
7 In this letter, as well as in certain later writings, Brentano is inclined to reduce all axiomatic
knowledge to the principle of contradiction. But he vacillates on this point; compare his Versuch über
die Erkenntnis. But the problems that are here discussed do not require that this question be settled.
8 This should be supplemented by: “if we were capable of having strict concepts of these things”.
9 Editor’s italics here and subsequently.
10 Compare the pertinent formulations in earlier essays of this book.
11 Husserl did not reply to any of these considerations.
12 This has abundantly been taken care of in the preceding.
13 According to Brentano, the laws of metamathematics need not be considered from the theoretical
point of view, since they have no application to reality and thus convey no knowledge about it. But
these laws may have practical importance, to the extent that they lead to new and useful methods of
calculation.
14 Brentano is here concerned with this question: from the theoretical standpoint, which classifies
disciplines by reference to their objects, where do these metamathematical problems belong? We
need not decide whether mathematics and our knowledge of it pertain merely to the application of
the law of contradiction, or whether mathematics has autonomous axioms of its own (compare the
Versuch über die Erkenntnis); the point is that this knowledge is of theoretical interest only to the
extent that it affords an insight into some reality or other. If there are no real objects with which such
mathematics is concerned, then it is of theoretical and scientific interest only to the extent that there
are acts of consciousness which are concerned with it. Hence from the theoretical point of view it
is to be classified as belonging somewhere within psychology, in analogy with our knowledge of
the analytic theory of colours. If the classification is not in fact made this way, the reason lies in the
predominance of the practical and technological interest and in the considerations concerning the
division of work, to which Brentano refers below. Compare G.Katkov, “Bewusstsein, Gegenstand,
Sachverhalt eine Brentanostudie,” Archiv f. die ges. Psychologie, Vol. 75, pp. 471 ff.
15 Compare A.Marty, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I: “Was ist Philosophie?”
16 The passages published here are from a dictation designated as a letter to Husserl. The beginning
and end are missing.
17 Compare Brentano’s Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburg
1862), pp. 21 ff.
18 In the lecture notes on ontology which Brentano used during the time he was at Würzburg, he
writes: “The remarkable passage (Summa Theologica, Part I, Q. 3, art. 4) in which Thomas is at least
very close to the truth, reads: ‘Reply to Objection 2. To be can mean either of two things. It may mean
the act of being (actum essendi), or it may mean the composition of a proposition effected by the
mind in joining a predicate to a subject. Taking to be in the first sense, we cannot understand God’s
existence or His essence; but only in the second sense. We know that this proposition which we form
about God when we say God is, is true; and this we know from His effects.’ What the ‘is’ expresses
in the statement ‘God is’ it also expresses in any other existential statement—no more and no less;
it does not denote anything. Aristotle himself saw this clearly and said as much (De Interpretatione,
I, and later De Anima, III, 6, and Metaphysics, IX, 10). In the last passage, he restricts himself to an
obviously inexact characterization, which holds only in the majority of cases, for he acknowledges a
truth to which it does not apply.”