Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

xxii Introduction
These irrealia, or non-things, are what fall under Husserl’s general “concept” of so-called
ideal objects.
We have already noted that at one time Brentano took “existence” and “non-existence”
as terms which are correlatives to the concept of truth. This doctrine, which Brentano long
since abandoned and condemned as purely fictitious, is revived in Husserl’s Ideen. Husserl
writes (p. 265): “We recognized that the description of the essence of consciousness
leads back to the description of the essence of what it is that one is conscious of in that
consciousness; this conscious correlate of consciousness is inseparable from it and yet not
really contained within it.” The fact that new terms—“Negates” and “Affirmates”—have
been coined for these correlates need not prevent one from recognizing the origin of the
doctrine. To be sure, Brentano never deluded himself into believing that the supposed
correlates of judgement are themselves the objects of judgement; Husserl makes this
mistake, however, and in so doing is forced to abandon the distinction between affirmative
and negative judgements, reformulating it as a distinction between the supposed objects
of judgement. 4 One finds nothing about “perception of states of affairs” in Brentano’s
work.* And Brentano is far from thinking of “the number three” as an ideal object. It was
rather Bolzano who was responsible for these doctrines. (Brentano recognized the value
of Bolzano’s work and recommended it—not, however, because of these doctrines, but
because of Bolzano’s critical attitude with respect to Kant and his affinity with Leibniz.)
After continued research and self-criticism, the later Brentano recognizes that the
correspondence theory and the doctrine of states of affairs, states of value, meanings, ideal
objects, and irrealla are mistaken, and he rejects them. (Compare the third and fourth
points in the statement of “psychologism” in Section 10 above.) This later view was first
published in 1911, in the new edition of the Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, but
it had been set forth in letters to friends and students since 1905.
The 1925 edition of Volume 2 of the Psychologie (which includes the third edition of the
Klassifikation) contains a series of farreaching discussions of these questions taken from
Brentano’s unpublished writings. As already noted, these have gone unappreciated up to
the present time. Despite the attitude of the phenomenologists and transcendentalists, I am
confident that to compile and publish these works, left to us by the foremost philosophical
mind of our age, will contribute to the regeneration of philosophy. I venture to say that
the most significant advance in philosophy since antiquity may be found here: in the final
overthrow of the correspondence theory; in the consequent liberation of the theory of the
evident, and hence of epistemology, from the correspondence theory; and finally in the
realization that there can be awareness or consciousness only of things—that is to say, of
realia or real entities (the onta of Aristotle’s theory of categories).
III. WHAT IS TRUTH?
12. Our contention is this: All such expressions as “true” and “false”, “correct” and
“incorrect”, “truth”, “eternal truth”, “objective validity”, and “tenability”, function in the
language only to call up the thought of one who judges with evidence. But the idea of
* See Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. 2, Part 2, pp. 140, 122.