Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

Introduction xxi
the developments and deviations of so-called “phenomenology”. To call Brentano’s theory
of knowledge “psychologism”, on the basis of these remarks of Husserl, is fantastic and
contrary to all historic truth.
Let us compare certain passages from the first edition of Brentano’s Vom Ursprung
sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889) with certain characteristic statements from the second edition
of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen.
Brentano (pp. 80–81): “Any judgement which is seen by one person to be true is
universally valid; its contradictory cannot be seen to be evident by any other person; and
anyone who accepts its contradictory is ipso facto mistaken. What I am here saying pertains
to the nature of truth: anyone who thus sees into something as true is also able to see that he
is justified in regarding it as a truth for all.”
Husserl (Vol. I, p. 191): “And accordingly we have the insight that if we have a genuine
insight, then no one else can have a genuine insight which conflicts with it.”
Brentano (p. 79): “The peculiar nature of insight—the clarity and evidence of certain
judgements—which is inseparable from their truth—has little or nothing to do with a
feeling of compulsion…. We can understand what distinguishes it from other judgements
only if we look for it in the inner peculiarity of the act of insight itself.”
Husserl (Vol. I, p. 189): “Evidence is not a concomitant feeling which, accidentally or
otherwise, connects itself with certain judgements. It is not at all a psychical characteristic
which simply happens to be attached to a given judgement of some particular class (such
as the class of so-called ‘true judgements’).”
Brentano (paragraph 11): “The precepts of logic are naturally valid rules of judging; that
is to say, we must adhere to them, since the judgement which accords with them is certain
and that which does not is exposed to error. Thus we are concerned here with the fact that
thought processes which conform to rules are naturally superior to those which do not.”
Husserl (Vol. I, p. 157): “The general conviction that the propositions of logic are norms
of thinking cannot be entirely unfounded; the self-evidence with which it enlightens cannot
be pure deception. Thought which is in accordance with rules has a certain inner superiority
which distinguishes these propositions from others.”
It is also noteworthy that, in the polemic against psychologism in Volume 1 of the
Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl does not attack Brentano himself. Nor does he cite
Brentano as the source of his critique.
11. This comparison of passages is relevant to the first two of the psychologistic theses
referred to above. Brentano’s views on these points are made abundantly clear in the
selections that follow. As for the third thesis, which Husserl opposes by appeal to the
so-called correspondence theory, Husserl’s argument is taken directly from the writings
and lectures of Brentano, who had extended and modified the Aristotelian tradition. This
is also true of the fourth point: Brentano had made the assumption of irrealia—of states
of affairs (existences and non-existences)—in the first of the selections published here and
modified the principle of adaequatio rei et intellectus by saying that our judgements must
be adequate to these irrealia. At the time of the lecture, he thus taught that there are certain
entities that are not things; his pupils were later to introduce new technical terms. Where
others spoke of “states of affairs” or “truths”, Meinong, for example, spoke of “objectives”.