Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
16. In the Cartesian logic which Arnauld offers us in the Port Royal Logic (Part 2, Ch. 3)
we read: “Propositions are divided, again, according to their matter, into true and false.
And it is clear that there are none which are not either true or false, since every proposition
denoting the judgement which we form of things is true when that judgement is conformed
to truth, and false when it is not so conformed.”* Thus the great revolution which Descartes
began leaves the Aristotelian definition of truth unshaken. 1
17. But, if we may believe Windelband, something quite different happened in that other
great philosophical revolution which took place in Germany while France was breaking
politically with the tradition of her past.
Kant is supposed to have been the one who was then first to reform the Aristotelian, or
as Windelband says, the Socratic conception of truth. Kant’s great achievement is said to
be here—and not elsewhere, as others have thought. “One misunderstands Kant’s entire
intention”, Windelband says in his Präludien (2nd edn, p. 149), “and one interprets his
doctrine as wrongly as possible if one thinks that he has shown that science can gain a
picture of the world of ‘appearances’, and that, on the other hand, it cannot know anything
of things-in-themselves…. The truth is …that, for him, it makes no sense to speak of a
picture which copies reality.” This concept retains a meaning only for the Socratics who
preserved the conception of truth as correspondence of presentation and thing (or, more
accurately, judgement and thing). And therefore it retains this meaning for the French
philosophers of the eighteenth century who, with a kind of resignation, and a smattering
of scepticism, deny man’s ability to know things as they are in themselves. Kant does not
know of any such barrier to our knowledge. What he did, rather, was to recast the concept
of truth. According to him truth is what corresponds with the norm of our mind; not what
corresponds with the object (unless one understands by the object nothing but the rule).
Moreover, according to Kant, truth is not restricted to judgements or to thought; it may
be found equally well in all the other areas of mental activity, in volition and in feeling,
provided only that they conform to certain norms or rules.
18. And so, at last, we have the ultimate reformation of the concept for which the world
has long been waiting! What could divide philosophers more than to look for different
concepts of truth—concepts which are nominally the same, but which in fact serve
quite different aims? Accordingly, Windelband classifies all philosophers as being either
Socratics, who have been left behind, or Kantians, who are the party of progress. It is to the
latter that victory belongs; the others are already non-existent. “All of us who philosophize
in the nineteenth century”, he says in his Preface, “are pupils of Kant.”
19. Now, gentlemen, if you are generous enough to count me a philosopher, you may
recognize the exaggeration of this pronouncement. I consider Kant’s entire philosophy
* Trans. Thomas Spencer Baynes, 10th edn. The French text reads: “Les propositions se divisent
encore selon la matière en vraies et en fausses. Et il est clair, qu’il n’y en peut point avoir, qui
ne soient ni vraies ni fausses; puisque toute proposition marquant le jugement que nous faisons
de choses est vraie, quand ce jugement est conforme a la vérité (si judicium rebus convenit), et
fausse, lors qu’il n’y est pas conforme.”