Brentano on psychologism and the background of phenomenology

Resumo

In a text entitled Vom Psychologismus, which was only published as an appendix to the 2nd edition of Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt in 1911, Franz Brentano positioned himself about the controversy about psychologism (Psychologismusstreit) by expressly refusing the label of psychologist given to him by Edmund Husserl, one of the most influential names in what would become known as the Brentano School. The development of this paper, which aims to analyze the Psychologismusstreit exclusively from the Brentanian perspective, is divided into three moments. In the first moment, I present Brentano's textual response to Husserl. In the second moment, I draw on the recent results of Porta’s investigations into the status of psychological method in philosophy in the nineteenth century and make explicit how this method presented itself in the context of the formulation of the Brentanian theory of knowledge as it was developed between 1874 and 1891 (PES and PD). In the third and last moment, taking as a basis the assumptions of Brentano's theory of knowledge formulated in his Descriptive psychology, I present two reasons sustained by Brentano to refuse the label of epistemological psychologism supposedly attributed to his theory of knowledge: a) Husserl was mistaken about his definition of truth; b) Husserl was also mistaken about his psychic description of the act of judging and, therefore, was unable to understand the relation between psychology, logic, and the theory of knowledge. I will leave open the question about the plausibility of the Brentanian thesis, given the recurrent later formulations and reformulations of Husserlian phenomenology, as well as the development of Psychologismusstreit.