Brentano S Concept of Descriptive Psycho

Chapter 4
Brentano’s Concept of Descriptive

Psychology
Dermot Moran
Abstract In this paper, I begin by outlining Franz Brentano’s connections with

John Henry Newman (on issues of faith) and then explore in detail Brentano’s
evolving conception of descriptive psychology from Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint (1874) to his Descriptive Psychology lectures (1887–1891). Brentano
was developing a descriptive, “empirical” science of mental phenomena (in opposi-
tion to Wundt’s physiological psychology and to Fechner’s psychophysics), and his
focus was on a priori necessary laws that are given directly to intuition. Brentano
developed his psychology from Aristotle and from the then contemporary psychol-
ogy (especially British psychologists, such as Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill,
Henry Maudsley, and others). Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology was deeply
influenced by Brentano’s descriptive psychology, although, in his mature works,
Husserl abandoned all of Brentano’s main distinctions and developed a new inten-
tional analysis that identified consciousness as a self-enclosed domain governed by
a priori eidetic laws. In this paper I will explore Brentano’s and Husserl’s concep-
tions of descriptive psychology but I shall also examine Wilhelm Dilthey’s account
of descriptive psychology that was based on ‘motivation’, a concept adopted by
Husserl. Husserl’s mature phenomenology advanced far beyond Brentano’s descrip-
tive psychology. But, despite their differences, I shall show that both Brentano and
Husserl were committed to a non-reductive sui generis exploration of the ‘life of
consciousness’ (Bewusstseinsleben) understood as a dynamic complex of essential
features that can be apprehended by reflective analysis.
Keywords Brentano · Newman · Dilthey · Descriptive psychology · Inner

perception · Introspection · Motivation
In memory of Dale Jacquette
D. Moran (*)
Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA
e-mail: dermot.moran@ucd.ie
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to 73
Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
D. Fisette et al. (eds.), Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy, Vienna Circle
Institute Yearbook 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40947-0_4
74 D. Moran
4.1 Franz Brentano’s Family Connection to Newman’s

Catholic University
Before discussing Brentano’s descriptive psychology, I would like to draw your

attention to interesting historical link between my former alma mater University
College Dublin and Franz Brentano. University College Dublin started life as the
Catholic University, founded by John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in 1854.
Newman was also the first rector of the university, serving from 1854 to 1858. Franz
Brentano was aware of Newman’s work and visited him in the Birmingham Oratory,
in May 1872, after Newman had left Dublin for good. There is an extant correspon-
dence between them. It was Franz’s devout Catholic mother Emilie (1810–1882)1
who recommended that her son go to see Newman because she had worries about
his faith. Brentano stayed with Newman in Birmingham for two weeks, from sec-
ond to 16th May 1872. They discussed issues concerning the declaration of papal
infallibility in 1870, Brentano’s crisis of faith, and whether he should remain in the
priesthood. After Brentano had left, Newman wrote a letter in Latin to an unknown
friend saying that Brentano had not been moved by any of Newman’s arguments.2
It is much less known that Franz Brentano’s older sister, Maria Ludovica Caecilia
Brentano (1836–1921), lived in Dublin for a period during Newman’s time there.
She was married to Sir Peter le Page Renouf (1822–1897), a British professor who
taught at Newman’s University from 1855 to 1864, firstly as a lecturer in French,
and then as professor of ancient history and Oriental languages. Renouf had studied
at Oxford, where, under the influence of Newman, he had converted to Catholicism
in 1842, nota bene: prior to Newman’s own conversion, and he left Oxford without
a degree. Newman, always loyal to the Oxford converts, offered Renouf a job in his
new university in Dublin.
In August 1856, Newman dispatched Renouf to Munich to purchase a medical
library for the Catholic University in Dublin.3 While in Germany, Renouf was intro-
duced to the Brentano family and met Ludovica, when she was just 20 and he was
34. They married in July 1857 and moved to the Dublin suburb of Kingstown (now
Dun Laoghaire). Ludovica herself met Newman in 1857 when she came to Dublin.
Her mother Emilie came to stay with her in Dublin after the birth of her son in
October 1858, but Newman had just left Dublin, so Brentano’s mother and Newman
never met, although they did correspond, having been connected through Ludovica.
1
Emilie Brentano was married to Christian Brentano and after his death, edited his writings, see
Christian Brentano, Nachgelassene religiöse Schriften, ed. Emilie Brentano, Aschaffenburg 1854.
She was an active translator of religious works.
2
Newman, John Henry/Dessain, Charles Stephen/Gornall, Thomas (1974), The Letters and Diaries
of John Henry Newman vol. XXVI: Aftermaths, January 1872 to December 1873, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 89–90. See Bottone, Angelo (2014/15), ‘When Brentano Visited Newman’,
in: Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, pp. 41–48.
3
In the previous year, 1855, Newman had established the first medical school in Dublin in Cecilia
Street, The Catholic University Medical School, which was later, in 1908, to become the University
College Dublin Faculty of Medicine.
4 Brentano’s Concept of Descriptive Psychology 75
Renouf, a self-taught Egyptologist, and specialist in hieroglyphics, later became

known for his translation of Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was completed after
his death by Edward Naville.4 In 1864 his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics
led to him being appointed Keeper of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum.
Renouf, like Brentano, opposed the doctrine of papal infallibility and wrote pam-
phlets about it. Brentano’s sister’s Ludovica wrote to Lord Acton on sixth September
1871 saying that her mother was very worried about Brentano’s clerical vocation
and afraid he would not get the professorship in the Catholic University of Würzburg.
As the Newman scholar and archivist, Angelo Bottone, records:
Ludovica adds “I believe that the affairs of the church also weigh heavily on his mind, and
help to make him feel so unhappy”. She is referring to the crisis of faith Franz Brentano was
going through following the first Vatican Council and particularly the declaration on the
papal infallibility. Towards the end of the letter she writes: “Mama had thought a visit to Dr
Newman might be desirable for Franz just now”.5
Lord Acton replied: “Nobody can once have met him without being deeply
impressed by his Persönlichkeit …. I shall be curious to see how he judges some of
my friends in this country.”6
Brentano was familiar with Newman’s philosophical work, An Essay in Aid of a
Grammar of Assent published in 1870.7 In his Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis
(The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, 1889)8 he called the Grammar
of Assent ‘an interesting work which has received but little attention in Germany’.9
In his Vom Dasein Gottes (On the Existence of God, published posthumously in
1929) he refers to the Grammar of Assent again;10 and in his Geschichte der
Philosophie der Neuzeit (History of Modern Philosophy) there is one page contain-
ing a series of notes and questions on the notion of faith or assent in Newman.11
4
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Sir P. LePage Renouf, continued and completed by Prof.
E. Naville, London: The Society of Biblical Archaeology 1904.
5
Ludovica Renouf to Lord Acton, 6 September 1871, in: Kevin J. Carhcart (Ed.) (2004), The
Letters of Peter le Page Renouf, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, vol. 4, pp. 107–8. I
6
Cathcart, Kevin J. (Ed.) (2004), Ibid., Dublin: University College Dublin Press, p. 107. See
Bottone, Angelo (2014/15), ‘When Brentano Visited Newman’, in: Yearbook of the Irish
Philosophical Society, pp. 41–48.
7
Newman, John Henry (1979), An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, introduction by Nicholas
Lash, South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
8
Brentano, Franz (1889), Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot; trans.
R.M. Chisholm and E.H. Schneewind, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969.
9
Ibid., p. 58.
10
Brentano, Franz (1929), Vom Dasein Gottes, hrsg. Alfred Kastil, Hamburg: Felix Meiner 1929;
trans. S.F. Krantz, On the Existence of God: Lectures Given at the Universities of Würzburg and
Vienna, Dordrecht: Nijhoff 1987, see p. 77. Brentano cites Newman as arguing that, although the
proof for the existence of God is probable, the knowledge that God exists can be known with cer-
tainty. It is natural for humans to move from probability to certainty.
11
Brentano, Franz, Geschichte der Philosophie der Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Hedwig, Hamburg:
Meiner 1987, p. 296.
76 D. Moran
Robin Rollinger who is currently editing Brentano’s 1884–1885 lectures on Die

elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen Reformen, confirms that Brentano discusses
Newman in those lectures.
Newman opposed the Lockean idea of degrees of assent. Assent, for Newman, is
‘absolute’ and ‘unconditional’ and unrelated to the nature or content of the ‘appre-
hension’. Inference is conditional; assent is given once and for all; it does not admit
of degrees. For Newman, there is either assent or not. Inference and assent are dif-
ferent; arguments cannot always command assent. Newman distinguished between
subjective certitude and objective certainty. Newman writes: Certitude is ‘...the per-
ception of a truth with the perception that it is a truth, or the consciousness of know-
ing as expressed in the phrase “I know that I know...”’.12 Truths held by assent may
be implicit or explicit. This account of assent held without explicit proof allegedly
had a strong influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who owned a copy of Newman’s
Grammar of Assent,13 in his On Certainty.
On 16th May 1872 Newman wrote to Brentano’s mother Emilie confirming that
her son Franz had visited him in Birmingham. On the following day he wrote a
second letter to Emilie Brentano, Franz mother:
My dear Madam, I read your letter with extreme sympathy for you, and great gratitude for
the confidence you place in me; and I have done my very best to fulfil your wishes. But, as
you know so well, the first springs of thought are from God. It is He, and not man, who
gives us those initial beliefs, views, and methods of inquiry, which are ruling principles in
our judgements and opinions. It is not by learned or by strong arguments, or by controver-
sial skill, that your dear son will be back to you – but by his Mother’s prayers. St Monica
had a long and time in seeking her son’s salvation, but she persevered, and at His own good
moment sent the St Ambrose to fulfil her prayer. Your son is far more advantageously placed
than her son. He is a man of irreproachable life. He wishes to do God’s will: He has a [….]
in the great mysteries and the old dogmas of Christianity, which St Augustin had not.
Recollect what a Bishop said to her: The child of so many tears cannot be lost”. God He will
hear you also: When with the woman in the Gospel (Luke XVIII) you cry out “against your
adversary”. We do not forget to offer our prayers in union with you.14
Newman’s influence on him was strong. Brentano went on to follow his con-
science and leave not just the priesthood but eventually the Catholic Church.15 But
in philosophical terms, what interested Brentano is the idea of assent as a direct
12
Newman, John Henry (1870), An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, p. 163.
13
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. Von Wright, translated by
Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, London: Harper & Row Publishers 1969. Newman speaks
about ‘spontaneous assent’ to our beliefs about everyday matters to which we give credence. See
also Wolfgang Kienzler, ‘Wittgenstein and John Henry Newman On Certainty’, in: M. Kober (Ed.)
(2006), Deepening Our Understanding of Wittgenstein, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 117–138. See
also Angelo Bottone, Angelo (2005), ‘Newman and Wittgenstein After Foundationalism’, in: New
Blackfriars, vol. 86 no. 1001, pp. 62–75.
14
Quoted in Bottone, Angelo (2014/15), ‘When Brentano Met Newman’, in: Yearbook of the Irish
Philosophical Society, pp. 43–44.
15
Schaefer, Richard (2007), ‘Infallibility and Intentionality: Franz Brentano’s Diagnosis of German
Catholicism’, in: Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 68, No. 3, pp. 477–499.
affirmation or rejection of a proposition, and also the notion that everyone has a
natural certitude which is not explicitly grounded in tested beliefs.
4.2 Brentano’s New Psychology
I shall now examine what precisely Brentano meant by ‘descriptive psychology’

(deskriptive Psychologie), a conception that emerged slowly in his writings from
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874)16 to his Descriptive Psychology
lectures (1887–1891).17 I shall make some comparisons with both Wilhelm Dilthey’s
descriptive psychology and then discuss in more detail its relation to Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenology, which, for a period (1891–1902), especially in the First
Edition of his Logical Investigations (1900–1901)18 Husserl also initially character-
ized as ‘descriptive psychology’.19 Of course, the term ‘phenomenology’ is also
used by Brentano from whom Husserl inherited it.
16
Brentano, Franz, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Hamburg: Meiner 1973, 2 volumes,
trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda McAlister, Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint, London: RKP 1973, reprinted with a new preface by Peter Simons, London: Routledge
1995, hereafter ‘PES’ and page number of the English translation. The first edition of Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint, published in Leipzig in 1874, was divided into two Books, with
three further books promised, and indeed even a sixth book on “the relationship between mind and
body”, according to the Foreword to the 1874 Edition (PES xv). Brentano republished the second
Book with some additional essays in 1911. In 1924 a second edition of the whole of Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint, was produced by Oskar Kraus with additional essays and notes.
17
Brentano, Franz, Deskriptive Psychologie, ed. R. Chisholm and W. Baumgartner, Hamburg:
Meiner 1982, trans. by Benito Müller as Descriptive Psychology, London: Routledge 1995.
Hereafter cited as ‘DP’ followed by page number of the English translation. I am indebted to Denis
Seron, ‘Brentano’s Project of Descriptive Psychology’ in Uriah Kriegel, Uriah (Ed.) (2017),
Routledge Handbook of Brentano and the Brentano School, Routledge.
18
Husserl, Edmund (1900–1901), Logische Untersuchungen, 2 Bände, Halle: Max Niemeyer.
Husserl himself oversaw the publications of four editions: a revised Second Edition of the
Prolegomena and first five Investigations in 1913, a revised Edition of the Sixth Investigation in
1921, a Third Edition with minor changes in 1922, and a Fourth in 1928. A critical edition, which
also includes Husserl’s written emendations and additions to his own copies (Handexemplar), has
appeared in the Husserliana series in two volumes: Volume XVIII, Logische Untersuchungen.
Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage, hrsg. Elmar Holenstein,
The Hague: Nijhoff 1975, and Volume XIX, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band:
Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, in zwei Bänden, ed. Ursula
Panzer, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1984. The only English translation is: Edmund Husserl, Logical
Investigations, 2 Volumes, trans. J.N. Findlay, revised Dermot Moran, London/New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul/Humanities Press, 2001 which translates from the Second Edition.
Hereafter, the Investigations will be cited as ‘LU’ followed by the relevant volume (I or II) and
page number in the English translation, and volume number and page number of the Husserliana
(abbreviated to ‘Hua’) edition of the German text.
19
See Brück, Maria (1933), Über das Verhältnis Edmund Husserls zu Franz Brentano vornehmlich
mit Rücksicht auf Brentanos Psychologie, Würzburg: Triltsch.
78 D. Moran
The term ‘descriptive psychology’ is used in many different senses in the nine-
teenth century and it certainly came to have wide currency in the Brentano school
(Twardowski, Meinong, Stumpf, etc.) following the Master.20 But the term was also
used by Wilhelm Dilthey, in a way that influenced Husserl especially in his 1925
lectures on Phenomenological Psychology, where Husserl discusses Dilthey direct-
ly.21 Brentano himself does not use the precise term ‘descriptive psychology’ in his
1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Rather, the term itself emerged in
his writings around 1887/1888, according to Oskar Kraus, in his 1924 Editor’s
Introduction to Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, but it is more or less
identical with what Brentano earlier calls ‘empirical psychology’. Brentano’s man-
uscripts that include the lecture course of 1887/1888 is entitled Deskriptive
Psychologie. A second lecture course, entitled Deskriptive Psychologie oder besch-
reibende Phänomenologie was delivered in 1888–1889.22 The third lecture course,
entitled Psychognosie, was given in 1890–1891 (DP, p. xvi). In his Author’s Preface
to his lecture given on 23rd January 1889, and originally entitled ‘On the Natural
Sanction for Law and Morality’ [Von der natürlichen Sanktion für Recht und sit-
tlich], and published as Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (The Origin of Our
Knowledge of Right and Wrong),23 Brentano writes:
What I have presented here is a part of a “Descriptive Psychology” which I hope to be able
to publish in its entirety in the near future. This work will develop some of the views that
were set forth in my Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and will differ in fundamen-
tal respects from everything that has previously been said upon the subject. My readers will
then be able to see, I hope, that I have not been idle during the long period of my literary
retirement.24
Brentano therefore sees his descriptive psychology as in direct continuity with

his psychology ‘from an empirical standpoint’. He also describes it as ‘pure psy-
chology’ in contrast to ‘physiological psychology’25 — insisting that he is in no way
disparaging physiological psychology, but at the same time pure psychology or
‘psychognosy’ is prior ‘in the natural order’.26 Elsewhere, Brentano likens
20
See Rollinger, Robin (1999), Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht: Kluwer;
and Albertazzi, Liliana/Libardi, M. /Poli, R. (Eds.) (1996), The School of Franz Brentano,
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
21
Descriptive psychology is now a name in use for a type of personalistic psychology advocated in
the United States based on the work of psychologist Peter Ossorio. See Ossorio, P. G. Persons
(1966), reprinted: Ann Arbor, Michigan: Descriptive Psychology Press 1995.
22
Although the term ‘Phänomenologie’ occurred in the title, it does not seem to have been used in
the lectures themselves.
23
Brentano, Franz, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot 1889;
reprinted Hamburg: Meiner 1969. trans. Roderick Chisholm and Elizabeth Schneewind as The
Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969, reprinted
2009). Hereafter ‘ORW’ and page number of the English translation.
24
ORW, p.xi.
25
DP, p.7.
26
Ibid., p.8.
descriptive psychology to a chemical analysis of a substance into its ultimate, sim-

plest constituents. He writes:
Just as the chemist separates the constituent elements of a compound, it seems that the
psychologist, too, should try to separate out the elementary phenomena which make up the
more complex phenomena.27
Others such as Wundt also used the idea of chemical analysis but in a more natu-
ralistic way to pick out the physiological parts of a psychic process rather than its
structural features, as Brentano seeks.
4.3 Husserl’s Conception of Descriptive Psychology

(1891–1902)
Husserl’s relationship with Brentano was complex, many-sided and extended over a
long period—from 1884 (when Husserl first began to attend Brentano’s lectures in
Vienna) up until shortly before Brentano’s death in March 1917, as evidenced by the
correspondence between them.28 In his Vienna years, Husserl even accompanied
Brentano on his vacations. Later, they would occasionally meet up, until their last
encounter in 1908. According to his doctoral student Maria Brück’s reminiscences,
Husserl had declared in 1932: ‘without Brentano I could not have written a word of
philosophy’.29 Even after he left Brentano and Vienna in 1886, Husserl diligently
collected the transcripts of Brentano’s lectures, such as his Descriptive Psychology
lectures of 1887–1891, his investigation of the senses, as well as his studies of fan-
tasy, memory, and judgment, which Husserl discussed in his Phantasy, Image
Consciousness and Memory (1898–1925) lectures. At their 1908 meeting, however,
Husserl reported that he had the sense that they no longer understood each other.30
Brentano and Husserl exchanged their publications. Thus, Husserl sent Brentano his
Philosophy of Arithmetic (sent in 1891) and the first volume of his Logical
Investigations (sent in 1900). Interestingly, in their correspondence, the one topic
they do not address is intentionality, although later Husserl would credit Brentano
with the re-discovery of this concept, while conceding that Brentano never grasped
its true significance nor possessed the method to investigate it properly. Husserl
always said he was primarily influenced by Brentano’s rediscovery of
27
PES, p.46.
28
Husserl, Edmund, Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schuhmann in collaboration with Elizabeth Schuhmann.
Husserliana Dokumente, 10 Volumes, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1994, vol. 1, pp. 3–59.
29
See Moran, Dermot (2017), ‘Husserl and Brentano’, in: Kriegel, Uriah (Ed.) (2017), Routledge
Handbook of Brentano and the Brentano School, London & New York: Routledge, pp. 293–304.
30
Hill, Claire Ortiz (1998), ‘From Empirical Psychology to Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and
the “Brentano Puzzle”’, in: Roberto Poli (Ed.) (1998), The Brentano Puzzle, Aldershot: Ashgate,
pp. 151–167, esp. p. 164.
80 D. Moran
intentionality.31 As Brentano says, consciousness is always ‘having- objectively’

(Gegenständlichhaben).32 But Brentano’s understanding of descriptive psychology
did not make use of intentional description in the manner in which it was developed
by Husserl. Indeed, Brentano did not make great use of intentionality once he had
identified it as the essential characteristic of all and only mental phenomena.
Brentano influenced Husserl in many areas including: the ideal of exact scientific
philosophy leading to essential definitions and a priori laws (Husserl’s strenge
Wissenschaft);33 the adoption of a mereological compositional analysis in the
dissection of philosophical problems; the project to reform logic involving the
reduction of the Aristotelian scheme; problems concerning the nature of time-
consciousness, especially the nature of the awareness of past experiences; and, the
issue under discussion here, the project for ‘descriptive psychology’ (also called by
both ‘phenomenology’) of the essences of conscious acts (perception, imagination,
memory etc.) and their inter-dependency (i.e. relations of founding). Thus, in his
later Amsterdam Lectures of 1928, commenting on the situation at the beginning of
the twentieth century, Husserl writes of the efforts of scientists like Ernst Mach to
offer a theory-free description of phenomena and compares this with developments
in psychology:
Parallel to this we find in certain psychologists, and first in Brentano, a systematic effort to
create a rigorously scientific psychology on the basis of pure internal experience and the
rigorous description of its data (“Psychognosia”).34
Undoubtedly Husserl’s conception of descriptive psychology came directly from

Brentano and later from Brentano’s student Carl Stumpf, with whom Husserl stud-
ied for his Habilitation (on Brentano’s recommendation). Even after his period in
Vienna, Husserl kept in touch with Brentano and, for instance, possessed a manu-
script of Brentano’s lectures on Descriptive Psychology (1887–1891).
Husserl’s first publication Philosophy of Arithmetic, moreover, is explicitly essay
in descriptive psychology, identifying the origin of our concepts of number, organ-
ised around Brentano’s distinction between ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) and ‘inauthen-
tic’ (uneigentlich) presentations.
31
See Moran, Dermot (2000), ‘Husserl’s Critique of Brentano in the Logical Investigations’,
Manuscrito, in: Special Husserl Issue, Vol. XXIII No. 2, pp. 163–205.
32
DP, p.155.
33
For an illuminating discussion of the meaning of ‘exact science’, especially as it was later taken
up by the Vienna Circle, see Huemer, Wolfgang (2018), “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia
nisi scientiae naturalis est” Brentano’s Conception of Philosophy as Rigorous Science’, in:
Brentano Studien 16/1. Both Husserl and Brentano thought of Kant, for instance, as an inexact
thinker whose invoked arbitrary or ‘mythical’ constructions.
34
Husserl, Edmund, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925. Hrsg.
W. Biemel, Husserliana IX, The Hague: Nijhoff 1968, reprinted 1977, pp. 212–3; translated in
Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger
(1927–31), The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, The Amsterdam Lectures “Phenomenology and
Anthropology” and Husserl’s Marginal Note in Being and Time, and Kant on the Problem of
Metaphysics. Ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard Palmer. Husserl Collected Works VI, Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers 1997, p. 302.
The second volume of the Logical Investigations, subtitled Investigations in

Phenomenology and the Theory of Knowledge, in its first edition (1901) offers
‘analytical inquiries’ (analytische Untersuchungen) or ‘descriptive analyses’ into
fundamental issues in epistemology and the philosophy of logic, and here Husserl
uses the term ‘descriptive psychology’ more or less as an equivalent for ‘phenom-
enology’. He speaks of carrying out a ‘phenomenology of the logical experiences’.35
Phenomenology is here introduced as a presuppositionless mode of approaching
epistemological concepts, in order to exhibit their conceptual contents and inter-
relations with other concepts with ‘clarity and definiteness’,36 by tracing these
concepts back to their ‘origin’ (Ursprung) in intuition. In his Introduction to the
Second Volume of Investigations, Husserl explicitly identifies phenomenology
with ‘descriptive psychology’: “Phenomenology is descriptive psychology.
Epistemological criticism is therefore in essence psychology, or at least capable of
being built on a psychological foundation.”37
But, around 1902, Husserl moved away from characterizing phenomenology –
especially eidetic phenomenology – as descriptive psychology, since he began to
see all psychology (i.e. both branches according to Brentano’s conception) as deeply
embedded in naturalism. Indeed, the mature Husserl regularly criticized Brentano
for his naturalism, as well as for not seeing the possibilities for the application of
intentional analysis, for not appreciating the concept of constitution. Brentano, for
his part, rejected Wesensschau and the positing of ideal, general objects, which
meant he could never accept Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology.
Almost from the very beginning (c. 1890), Husserl was explicitly critical of
many aspects of Brentano’s philosophical outlook, including Brentano’s conception
of logic as an art of reasoning (Kunstlehre) and his attempt to explain all forms of
number in terms of authentic and inauthentic presentations. Furthermore, Husserl’s
discovery of the phenomenological reduction and his explicit embrace of transcen-
dental philosophy after 1907 meant that he thenceforth characterized Brentano,
somewhat unfairly, as a naturalist whose project could never be realized because it
missed the very essence of consciousness. In fact, despite his criticisms, it took
Husserl many years to extract himself from under the shadow of Brentano. As he
wrote in a very late letter on 18 June 1937 (he died the following April) to his
American student Marvin Farber:
Even though I began in my youth as an enthusiastic admirer [als begeisterter Verehrer] of
Brentano, I must admit that I deluded myself, for too long, and in a way hard to understand
now, into believing that I was a co-worker [Mitarbeiter] on his philosophy, especially, his
psychology. But in truth, my way of thinking was a totally different one [eine total andere]
from that of Brentano, already in my first work, namely the Habilitation work of 1887...38
35
Phänomenologie der logischen Erlebnisse, LU, I Intro., p. 168; Hua XIX/1 10.
36
Klarheit und Deutlichkeit, LU, I, p, 168; Hua XIX/1 10.
37
LU, I, Intro., p. 176; Hua XIX/1 24.
38
Husserl, Edmund, Briefwechsel, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 82; trans in Kah Kyung Cho, ‘Phenomenology
as Cooperative Task: Husserl-Farber Correspondence during 1936–37,’ in: Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, Supplement 1990, pp. 36–43, esp. p. 36.
82 D. Moran
Husserl was particularly drawn to Brentano’s efforts to reform classical Aristotelian

logic in his 1884–1885 lecture course, Die elementare Logik und die in ihr nötigen
Reformen [Elementary Logic and its Necessary Reforms]. Late in life, Husserl was
still crediting Brentano, for instance in his Crisis of European Sciences §68, ‘for the
fact that he [Brentano] began his attempt to reform psychology with an investigation
of the peculiar characteristics of the mental (in contrast to the physical) and showed
intentionality to be one of these characteristics; the science of “mental phenomena”
then has to do everywhere with conscious experiences’.39
Husserl would discuss, in his own lectures on ethics and value theory,40 delivered
between 1908 and 1914, Brentano’s conception of value theory based on Brentano’s
lectures on ‘Practical Philosophy’ (Practische Philosophie, Wintersemester 1884)
that he had audited in Vienna (and which rejected Kant’s categorical imperative as
a foundation for morality and replaced it with ‘do the best one can’).41 Brentano
drew a structural parallel between acts of judgment and acts of feeling and willing
in terms of their object-directedness. But Husserl departed from Brentano in think-
ing (with Kant) that the moral good is produced by the good will. Subsequently, in
Ideas I, Husserl will cite Brentano’s Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (Brentano
1889/1969). Husserl and Brentano both agreed on the need for a formal axiology.
Husserl also attended Brentano’s 1885–1886 course ‘Selected Questions from
Psychology and Aesthetics’ (Ausgewählte Fragen aus Psychologie und Ästhetik)
and later in a letter to Brentano of 27 March 1905 recalled that these lectures helped
him to reflect on the relation between perception and fantasy. Husserl resisted
Brentano’s view that memory of the past is actually a kind of fantasy.
Husserl emphasises more and more, from Ideas I (1913)42 onwards that con-
sciousness must be approached in its ‘purity’, in pure ‘immanence’, as a self-
enclosed domain with everything contingent and all assumptions drawn from the
actual, ‘transcendent’ world removed:
… consciousness considered in its “purity” must be held to be a self-contained complex of
being [als ein für sich geschlossener Seinszusammenhang] a complex of absolute being [als
ein Zusammenhang absoluten Seins] into which nothing can penetrate and out of which
nothing can slip…43
39
Crisis, pp. 233–4; Hua VI 236. Husserl, Edmund, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften
und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie,
ed. W. Biemel, Husserliana VI, The Hague: Nijhoff 1954; trans. David Carr. The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.
Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press 1970. Hereafter ‘Crisis’ followed by page number of
English translation and Husserliana volume and page number.
40
Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre, Husserl 1988.
41
Husserl 1988: 90, 221.
42
Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.
Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1. Halbband: Text der 1–3.
Auflage, ed. Karl Schuhmann, Husserliana Volume III/1, The Hague: Nijhoff 1977; trans. Daniel
O. Dahlstrom. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book:
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014.
Hereafter ‘Ideas I’.
43
Ideas I § 49, p. 90; Hua III/1 93.
Consciousness is a unified ‘complex’ (Zusammenhang, Komplex), a seamless

living stream involving a web of interrelated emotional and affective states, includ-
ing desires, feelings, moods, and so on. Acts and attitudes are founded on one
another, interpenetrate and modify one another. It is not enough, therefore, to isolate
the elements, the alphabet or ‘ABC’ of consciousness with its grammar and syntax.
The interlocking interconnection of Erlebnisse, with its different layers or ‘strata’
that ‘interpenetrate or intersaturate’ each other,44 must also be mapped and under-
stood. The ‘connections of consciousness’45 must be documented and clarified (and,
ultimately, justified or validated). Intentional life takes many forms,46 which must be
identified, described, classified, with their intentional contents, objects, ‘modes of
givenness’, and ‘modes of validation’ (Geltungsmodi). Husserl had moved far
beyond Brentano’s pure psychology.
4.4 Wilhelm Dilthey’s Concept of Descriptive Psychology
More or less around the same time as Brentano was developing his ideas on descrip-
tive psychology in his lectures in Vienna, Wilhelm Dilthey, in his very important
1894 essay on descriptive and explanatory psychology, Ideen über eine besch-
reibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, was advocating a similar science of psy-
chology as a foundation for the human sciences.47 A decade earlier, in his Introduction
to the Human Sciences (1883), Dilthey had argued that a ‘descriptive psychology’
was a necessary ‘reflective starting point’ for the human sciences. Dilthey’s position
in many ways parallels that of Brentano.48 Descriptive psychology, for Dilthey,
aimed at describing the inner content and meaning of mental states, approached
from a different position than from the natural sciences that depended on causation.
Causation, according to Dilthey, could only explain how psychic states follow one
another; that is the function of explanatory psychology (‘die erklärende
Psychologie’). Dilthey means by explanatory psychology the work of Mill, Spencer,
and even Münsterberg. Descriptive psychology, on the other hand, must work with
the notion of motivation. In our lived experience, what is essential (relative to the
44
Sie durchdringen sich oder durchtränken sich, Hua XVI 75.
45
Bewusstseinsverknüpfungen, Hua VII 252.
46
Hua XXXV 81.
47
Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm (1894), Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,
in: Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin,
pp. 1309–1407; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5, Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die
Philosophie des Lebens. Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1924, pp. 139–240; trans. Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding,
R.M. Zaner and K.L. Heiges (trans.), with an introduction by R.A. Makkreel, The Hague: Martinus
Nijhof 1977.
48
See Orth, Ernst Wolfgang (1984), ‘Wilhelm Dilthey und Franz Brentano zur
Wissenschaftsforschung’, in: Phänomenologische Forschungen 16, pp. 24–54.
84 D. Moran
whole of our life) stands out from what is inessential.49 There is the flow of experi-
ence (Erlebnis); then the pre-reflective awareness of experience that Dilthey called
‘Innewerden’; and finally there is ‘inner perception’ (innere Wahrnehmung). Dilthey
wanted a ‘descriptive or analytical psychology’ which offered a ‘presentation of the
components and continua which one finds uniformly throughout all the developed
modes of human psychic life, where these components form a unique nexus which
is neither added nor deduced, but rather is concretely lived [through] (erlebt).’50 All
human life is fleeting experience, what remains constant is consciousness of self
and consciousness of world.51 It is the ‘nexus of life’ (Lebenszusammenhang) that
can be experienced in ‘inner perception’.52 Psychology must capture the depth of
life – and hence, for Dilthey, there is more genuine psychology to be found in King
Lear or Hamlet than in the manuals of explanatory psychology.53 Descriptive psy-
chology, for Dilthey, finds structural laws that govern the formation of a psychic life
as a developing whole, as a striving governed by values and teleology – all the pro-
cesses work together to ‘give form to the soul’.54 Psychic life is a nexus that ‘tends
towards the fullness of life, towards the satisfaction of one’s drives and happiness’.55
Dilthey shows considerable awareness of the importance of what he calls ‘objective
spirit’ (objektiver Geist).56
4.5 Brentano’s Mereological ‘ABC of Consciousness’
Just as Dilthey recognized the interconnected flow of conscious life, and yet sought
to parse it into its identifiable moments, so too Brentano’s descriptive psychology
offers an a priori analysis of psychological states into their atomic components or
‘fundamental classes’ (Grundklasse). Husserl would later term this the ‘ABC of
consciousness’ (das ABC des Bewusstseins).57 Psychology, properly pursued, carves
out our mental nature at its joints. Psychology as an analytic science, for Brentano,
reveals the most fundamental natural kinds of ‘the psychic’ (das Psychische).
Psychology, then, is the descriptive study of the ‘ultimate mental elements out of
49
Dilthey, Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, p. 56 (GS V, p. 173).
50
Ibid., p. 35 (GS V, p. 152).
51
Ibid., p. 83 (GS V, p. 200).
52
Ibid., p. 35 (GS V, p. 152).
53
Ibid., p. 36 (GS V, p. 153).
54
Ibid., p. 59 (GS V, p. 176).
55
Ibid., p. 90 (GS V, p. 209).
56
See Throop, C. Jason (2002), ‘Experience, Coherence, and Culture: The Significance of Dilthey’s
“Descriptive Psychology” for the Anthropology of Consciousness’, in: Anthropology of
Consciousness 13 no. 1, pp. 2–26.
57
See Ludwig Binswanger’s reminiscence, ‘Dank an Edmund Husserl’, in Edmund Husserl
1859–1959, Recueil commémoratif publié á l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philos-
ophe, Dordrecht: Nijhoff 1960, p. 65.
which more complex phenomena arise’, as he puts it in Psychology from the an

Empirical Standpoint,58 or of ‘psychical realities’, as he puts it in Descriptive
Psychology.59
Brentano thought that all complex psychological states (he called them ‘acts’)
could be explained as complexes of the three fundamental acts, namely, ‘presenta-
tions’ (Vorstellungen), judgments (Urteile), and emotional movements
(Gemütsbewegungen) or the ‘phenomena of love and hate’). Brentano’s immediate
model for his tripartite division of mental life is Descartes.60 Furthermore, as a
Cartesian, Brentano attributed absolute reality or being to our psychological states
since they appear as they are to the experiencing subject. As Brentano puts it, their
esse is percipi: ‘As they appear to be, so they are in reality’.61 But he is also inspired
by British Empiricism, especially Hume’s distinction between impressions and
ideas. All ideas should be traced back to impressions, similarly complex judgments
have to traced back to their founding presentations. Descriptive psychology is meant
to provide a kind of alphabet and laws of combination or the syntax and grammar of
mental states. In 1895, in My Last Wishes for Austria, Brentano invokes the
Leibnizian idea of a characteristica universalis and sees it as discovering connec-
tions ‘in the same way as the totality of words arises from letters’.62 Here he also
publicly uses the term ‘descriptive psychology of psychognosy’. In Meine letzten
Wünsche für Österreich Brentano sees the distinction between descriptive psychol-
ogy and genetic psychology as one of the defining doctrines of his ‘school’:
My school distinguishes a psychognosy and a genetic psychology (in distant analogy to
geognosy and geology). The one shows all the final psychical constituents from the combi-
nation of which arises the totality of psychical phenomena, in the same way as the totality
of words arises from letters. Its implementation could serve as basis for a characteristica
universalis as envisaged by Leibniz and, before him, Descartes. The other one teaches us
about the laws according to which phenomena come and disappear. Given that, due to the
undeniable dependency of the psychical functions on the processes in the nervous system,
the conditions are to a large extent physiological, one can see here how psychological inves-
tigations must intertwine with physiological ones.63
On this account descriptive psychology is opposed to psychophysics and to

‘genetic’ psychology (which doesn’t just mean physiological psychology—a term
that also had a wide number of different meanings in Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920)
and others – but also deals with the generalized laws governing the flow of experi-
ences, such as the principle of association, and so on). Brentano frequently refers
to the ‘law of the succession of mental phenomena’.64 In this sense Brentano’s
58
PES, p. 45.
59
DP, p. 137.
60
Ibid. p. 8.
61
PES, p. 20.
62
Franz Brentano, Franz (1895), Meine letzten Wünsche für Österreich, Stuttgart: Verlag der
J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung. This was originally published as a series of articles.
63
cited in DP, p. xvi.
64
PES, p. 47.
86 D. Moran
distinction between physiological and descriptive psychology is different from the

distinction in Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology.65 Wundt believes
psychology is the investigation of ‘conscious processes in the modes of connexion
peculiar to them’,66 but conscious processes are embodied and, Wundt says, it is not
possible to do psychology while neglecting physiology. Wundt regarded his method
as revolutionary, akin to the revolution in the natural sciences produced by the
experimental method. Wundt’s aim is to show the relation between the two sciences
of ‘vital phenomena’ i.e. physiology and psychology. As he writes:
Physiology is concerned with all those phenomena of life that present themselves to us in
sense perception as bodily processes, and accordingly form part of that total environment
which we name the external world. Psychology, on the other hand, seeks to give account of
the interconnexion of processes which are evinced by our own consciousness, or which we
infer from such manifestations of the bodily life in other creatures as indicate the presence
of a consciousness similar to our own.67
Wundt is critical of any reliance on a purely descriptive psychology or what he

calls ‘direct apprehension of conscious processes themselves’. He writes:
Psychologists, it is true, have been apt to take a different attitude towards physiology. They
have tended to regard as superfluous any reference to the physical organism; they have sup-
posed that nothing more is required for a science of mind than the direct apprehension of
conscious processes themselves. It is in token of dissent from any such standpoint that the
present work is entitled a “physiological psychology.”68
Wundt is proposing a psychology informed by physiology: “In so far as physio-

logical psychology receives assistance from physiology in the elaboration of experi-
mental methods, it may be termed experimental psychology.”69
Wundt wants an explicitly experimental science as opposed to one based on
‘self-observation’:
It is only with grave reservations that what is called ‘pure self-observation’ can properly be
termed observation at all and under no circumstances can it lay claim to accuracy. On the
other hand, it is of the essence of experiment that we can vary the conditions of an occur-
rence at will and, if we are aiming at exact results; in a quantitatively determinable way.70
Aside from Wundt, One of Brentano’s chief targets is Gustav Theodor Fechner’s
Elemente der Psychophysik (Fechner, 1860),71 which had considerable impact on
him (leading to a correspondence with Fechner, whom he first met on his European
travels in November 1873). Other targets are, of course, Wilhelm Wundt, as well as
65
Wundt, Wilhelm, Principles of Physiological Psychology, trans. Edward Bradford Titchener,
New York: Macmillan, 1904. Hereafter ‘Principles’.
66
Principles, p. 2.
67
Ibid., p. 1.
68
Ibid., p. 2.
69
Principles, p. 3.
70
Ibid., p. 1.
71
Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1860), Elemente der Psychophysik, Leipzig: Breitkopf und
Härtel 1860.
British psychologists such as Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill, Henry Maudsley,
and others.
Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), in opposition to Mill, had sought to base psychol-
ogy on physiology,72 and had asserted that ‘material conditions are the basis of
consciousness’.73 On Maudsley’s view, the mind even when it is inactive (non-
conscious) is still working and only physiology will cast light on this. Brentano, on
the other hand, opposes the idea of ‘unconscious ideas’.74 Brentano thinks Maudsley
ends up admitting that all physiology can do is overthrow false findings of old psy-
chology, it can offer no insight about how the new science of psychology is to be
pursued.75
Brentano compared descriptive psychology as a descriptive, classificatory sci-
ence, to botany, zoology and geology. One must first discover, identify and classify
new forms of animal and plant life. And so it is for the mind. Brentano writes:
Psychology, like the natural sciences, has its basis in perception and experience. Above all,
however, its source is to be found in the inner perception of our own mental phenomena. We
would never know what a thought is, or a judgement, pleasure or pain, desires or aversions,
hopes or fears, courage or despair, decisions and voluntary intentions if we did not learn
what they are through inner perception of our own phenomena. Note, however, that we said
that inner perception [Wahrnehmung] and not introspection, i.e. inner observation
[Beobachtung], constitutes this primary and essential source of psychology.76
In the case of psychology, these ultimate constituents are intentional states. Its
discoveries are exact, a priori laws (laws more exact than the laws of physics),
according to Descriptive Psychology, unlike the inductive laws of physiological
psychology. Brentano emphasizes the exactness of descriptive psychology.77 In a
note added in a later edition in PES Brentano writes that psychology can ascend to
general laws without induction and is as ‘a priori as mathematics’. He continues:
But while psychology never leaves the domain of concepts based directly on perception,
mathematics and geometry immediately turn to the most complicated conceptual construc-
tions. For example, a concept of an ideal geometrical solid, which is never formed by sim-
ple abstraction but already involves a process of conceptual attribution not directly based on
perception, belongs to such a class of concepts. This is, of course, even more true of a
concept such as “3+n dimensions.” Mathematics, on the other hand, is dependent upon
descriptive psychology insofar as a clarification of its basic concepts and ultimate axioms is
impossible without analysis of consciousness; hence, of course, we also speak of “philoso-
phy of mathematics.”78
72
PES, p. 55.
73
Ibid., p. 56. Maudsley, Henry (1867), The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, New York:
Appleton. Maudsley was a critic of Mill and an admirer of Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and
others. He is proposing a ‘physiology of the mind’ – primarily interested in the study of insanity.
74
PES, p. 59.
75
Ibid., p. 55.
76
Ibid., p. 29.
77
DP, p. 7.
78
PES p. 29 n. 1.
88 D. Moran
According to Brentano, psychological laws are sui generis; they cannot be

deduced from physical laws.79 Furthermore, as he would later emphasize, in this
sense psychology is more fundamental that physics, since psychic laws track our
experience which is what is most immediate for us; whereas external reality is
mediated through our psychic experiences. Brentano always maintained that our
most direct familiarity is with our own conscious states. Descriptive psychology,
furthermore, can uncover a priori, universal truths on the basis of insights from
immediate, individual experience –even from a single instance of an individual per-
son carrying out inner perception on his or her own states. Brentano did not think
his descriptive empirical psychology is inductive in the sense of making generaliza-
tions. Rather, he believes psychology can generate necessary laws and apodictic
truths. Indeed, he claims that ‘… the ascent to apodictic truths, i.e. to insights which
are obvious and self-evident from the general ideas obtained in this way, is accom-
plished directly without any inductive steps’.80
Brentano somewhat misleadingly refers to psychic states as ‘phenomena’ – sim-
ply in so far as he does not want to commit himself as to their physical or metaphysi-
cal nature. As we shall see, he only grudgingly accepts the definition of psychology
as the science of mental phenomena.81 He was certainly troubled by invocation of
the ‘soul’ and, at least initially, he sought to pursue a psychology of mental episodes
that bracketed the question of the role and status of the ego (something for which
Husserl would criticize him). In fact, Brentano did move towards a much deeper
appreciation of the metaphysical nature of the personal ego, and, in his 1901 Outline
of a Psychognosy, for example, he says that each of us appears to ourselves as a
‘personal unity’.82 In his later reist phase, he even saw the psychological agent as the
only true substance.
Especially in his discussion of our sense of ‘proteroaesthesis’, or the experience
of one thing as being after or subsequent to another, Brentano emphasizes – as does
Husserl – the unity of consciousness. He writes in Descriptive Psychology: ‘The
whole of present consciousness is therefore decidedly embraced by a real unity
[eine Einheit der Realität]’.83 Just as Dilthey maintained (and indeed William James
and Henri Bergson), consciousness is an organic but complex unity:
Nevertheless, it [human consciousness] is undoubted composed of many parts, some of
which, like seeing-hearing, are mutually separable, others [of which], like the seeing and
the noticing of what is seen, are at least one-sidedly separable.84
Separable and distinctional parts can be apprehended by consciousness and this will
influence both Stumpf and Husserl.
79
Ibid., p. 47.
80
Ibid. p. 29 n. 3.
81
Ibid., pp. 9–11.
82
DP, p. 155.
83
Ibid., p. 15.
84
Ibid., p. 16.
4.6 The Priority of Descriptive Psychology as a Science
In 1874 and, again, in 1889, Brentano emphasizes that descriptive psychology has
priority among the sciences. According to Brentano, following Aristotle, De Anima
402a1–3,85 psychology is a science prior to the other sciences in importance. He
repeats this in 1889 when he says that ‘psychognosy is prior in the natural order’.86
Description precedes explanation. Thus, anatomy precedes physiology.87 Of course,
the findings of genetic psychology can be useful for descriptive psychology, but one
must have a general sense of the flora and fauna of a particular field before one can
analyze it more causally. He contrasts his descriptive psychology with psychophys-
ics and physiology.
In addition, it is precisely the a priori and exact character of psychology (based
on inner perception) over and against natural science which studies matters that are
really signs for what is behind them.88 He writes:
The high theoretical value of psychological knowledge is obvious in still another respect.
The worthiness of a science increases not only according to the manner in which it is
known, but also with the worthiness of its object. And the phenomena the laws of which
psychology investigates are superior to physical phenomena not only in that they are true
and real in themselves, but also in that they are incomparably more beautiful and sublime.89
Brentano’s editor Oskar Kraus summarizes this very boldly in his note:
Psychology is distinguished by the fact that it has to do with phenomena which are known
immediately as true and real in themselves. This, and nothing else, was and is Brentano’s
doctrine.90
This is a peculiarity of Brentano’s concept of the psychological. Furthermore,

Brentano clearly values psychological acts and operations as of a higher order than
any events in nature. From this point of view, it seems to me that it is quite wrong to
characterize Brentano as a naturalist (as Husserl does albeit indirectly). Brentano
thinks of psychical reality as of a higher order than physical reality although he
brackets this ‘metaphysical’ prejudice in his actual psychological investigations.
What remains – as Husserl will note – is the peculiar immediate givenness of mental
phenomena.
Psychology, for Brentano, is not just first in the natural (metaphysical) order,
because of the being of psychological entities, it also provides the underlying science
for other human sciences – including aesthetics, politics, ethics, and, controversially,
85
see PES, p. 26.
86
DP, p. 8; p. 13.
87
Ibid., p. 8.
88
PES, p. 19.
89
Ibid., p. 20.
90
Ibid., p. 20 n. 13.
90 D. Moran
logic.91 Psychology, furthermore, not just has intense theoretical interest, it also has
immense practical value – it is even called the ‘science of the future’.92
In Book One of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano goes on to
review various proposals for psychology (Wundt, Mill). He proceeds in Aristotelian
manner – proposing a definition, discussing it, finding flaws with it e.g. he has prob-
lems with ‘science of the soul’, and even ‘science of mental phenomena’,93 since, he
concedes, some think ‘phenomena’ do not really exist. He does think psychology
classically included the great theme of the immortality of the soul and in his 1901
Sketch of a Psychognosy he accepts the title ‘science of the soul’ or ‘science of the
activities of the soul or as the science of the relations of the soul’.94 Brentano is
against a purely materialist account of psychology as was gaining ground in his day
(e.g. Lange). As he writes later in his discussion of arguments for the exis-
tence of God:
One view very widely accepted by natural scientists is that a physiological process is the
substratum for a psychological one. Consciousness supervenes on certain processes in the
brain, so to speak, as a parergon, as a surplus with no corresponding surplus on the
other side.95
Brentano is a great admirer of the Aristotelian aporetic method:

In concluding our discussion of psychological method, let us add a final and more general
remark concerning a methodological procedure which often prepares and facilitates inves-
tigations in other fields, but which does so especially in the psychological field. I have in
mind the procedure which Aristotle used to be so fond of, namely, compiling “aporiai.” This
method exhibits all the various conceivable assumptions, indicates for each of them the
characteristic difficulties, and in particular gives a dialectical and critical survey of all the
opposing views, whether formulated by eminent men or held by the people. … I believe that
it is evident why psychologists in particular can derive even greater profit from the conflict-
ing opinions of others than investigators in any other field. There is some truth, some expe-
riential basis, underlying each of these opinions even though it may be viewed one-sidedly
or interpreted erroneously. Moreover, when we are dealing with mental phenomena, each
individual has his own special perceptions which are not accessible in the same way to
anyone else.96
91
Ibid., p. 21.
92
Ibid., p. 25.
93
Ibid., p. 10.
94
DP, p. 155.
95
Brentano, Franz, On the Existence of God: Lectures given at the Universities of Würzburg and
Vienna (1868–1891), ed. and trans. Susan Krantz, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1987, p. 57.
96
PES, p. 73.
4.7 Introspection and Inner Perception
In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano claims to be the first to have

made the distinction between introspection and inner perception.97 Brentano was
acutely aware of the limitations of inner perception, the observation of states in
immediate memory, the limitation to the peculiarities of the specific individual, the
lack of capacity for carrying out experiments. He writes:
The experimental foundation of psychology, therefore, would always remain insufficient
and unreliable, if this science were to confine itself to the inner perception of our own men-
tal phenomena and to their observation in memory. This is not the case, however. In addition
to the direct perception of our own mental phenomena we have an indirect knowledge of the
mental phenomena of others. The phenomena of inner life usually express themselves, so to
speak, i.e. they cause externally perceivable changes.98
He continues:
They are expressed most fully when a person describes them directly in words. Of course
such a description would be incomprehensible or rather impossible if the difference between
the mental lives of two individuals was such that they did not contain any common element.
In that case their exchange of ideas would be like that between a person who was born blind
and another who was born without the sense of smell trying to explain to one another the
color and the scent of a violet. But this is not the case. On the contrary, it is obvious that our
capacity for mutually intelligible communication encompasses all kinds of phenomena and
that we ourselves are able to form ideas of mental states experienced by another person
during a fever or under other abnormal conditions on the basis of his description.99
Here Brentano – like Ryle – sees a significant role for language. We should study
how others express their experiences – beliefs, desires and emotions. It was
J. L. Austin who later took the view that the number of distinct psychological states
could be determined from the number of different psychological verbs in a given
language (e.g. assume, surmise, doubt, etc).
Brentano claims to have clarified the notion of ‘inner perception’ – against critics
such as Lange. Inner perception is our direct apprehension of the occurrent mental
act as it occurs – our awareness of the perceiving, judging, willing or imagining. On
the other hand, Brentano acknowledges that the experienced present is very short
and what many calls inner perception is actually ‘observation in memory’.100 ‘Inner
observation’ only occurs in memory, but memory as fallible, ‘whereas inner percep-
tion is infallible and does not admit of doubt’.101 He agrees with the critics of intro-
spection who say that as soon as one focuses attention on one’s anger, it dissipates.
97
Ibid., p. 30. For a discussion of Brentano on inner perception, see Mark Textor, Mark (2015),
‘“Inner Perception Can Never Become Inner Observation”: Brentano on Awareness and
Observation’, in: Philosopher’s Imprint vol. 15 no 10, pp. 1–19.
98
PES, p. 37.
99
Ibid., p. 37–38.
100
Ibid., p. 35.
101
Ibid., p. 35.
92 D. Moran
We can of course gain psychological knowledge about others, but only on the basis
of what we already recognize on the basis of inner perception:
Inner perception, therefore, constitutes the ultimate and indispensable precondition of the
other two sources of knowledge. Consequently, and on this point traditional psychology is
correct as against Comte, inner perception constitutes the very foundation upon which the
science of psychology is erected.102
Brentano proposes as a universal law that ‘we can never focus our attention on the
object of inner perception’.103 In inner perception, our focus is on the mental act or
complex of acts that we are undergoing.
Furthermore, and this adds to Brentano’s Berkeleyanism, inner perception for
Brentano is actually the most genuine form of perception (as he writes in Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint Book Two) and in fact the only mental act that should
truly be called ‘perception’:
Moreover, inner perception is not merely the only kind of perception which is immediately
evident; it is really the only perception in the strict sense of the word. As we have seen, the
phenomena of the so-called external perception cannot be proved true and real even by
means of indirect demonstration. For this reason, anyone who in good faith has taken them
for what they seem to be is being misled by the manner in which the phenomena are con-
nected. Therefore, strictly speaking, so-called external perception is not perception. Mental
phenomena, therefore, may be described as the only phenomena of which perception in the
strict sense of the word is possible.104
External perception is not really perception, for Brentano, it seems to be more like
an act of inferring: “The objects (mental phenomena) of inner perception have real
existence whereas colors and sounds etc., have only ‘intentional existence’.”105
4.8 The Fundamental Class of Presentations
One of Brentano’s fundamental psychological laws is that all mental acts are depen-
dent on ‘presentations’ (Vorstellungen): ‘All mental phenomena are either presenta-
tions or based on presentations’.106 Presentation means any appearing before the
mind: ‘We speak of a presentation when something appears to us’ (Wir reden von
einem Vorstellen wo immer uns etwas erscheint); and again: ‘As we use the verb “to
present”, “to be presented” means the same as “to appear”’.107 A presentation is any
kind of ‘appearance’ or ‘appearing’ (Erscheinung): ‘By presentation I do not mean
that which is presented but the act of presenting’.108 He mentions – hearing a sound,
102
Ibid., p. 43.
103
Ibid., p. 30.
104
Ibid., p. 91.
105
Ibid., p. 92.
106
Ibid., p. 85.
107
Ibid., p. 81.
108
Ibid., p. 79 and p. 80.
seeing a colour, feeling warmth or cold—‘as well as similar states of imagination’.109

In Descriptive Psychology, he speaks of ‘experiential presentations’.110
Presentations merely present something to the mind; in themselves they do not
indicate existence or non-existence, and are not valued as good or evil, Brentano
says: ‘Psychological acts that belong to the first class cannot be said to be either
correct or incorrect’,111 yet later he says that every presentation is a good in itself,112
since it provides some kind of addition or extension to our consciousness, ‘a wel-
come enrichment to our world of ideas’.113 Presentations, on this account, seem to
be very close to Hume’s ‘impressions’ (translated in the German as Eindrücke), but,
for Brentano, they cover a wider range of mental undergoings, from individual sen-
sory experiences to day-dream images to entertaining abstract ideas. They can be
perceived, remembered, imagined or ideated in any manner. Presentations are not
sense-data but they may include them. Thus, Brentano even speaks of the ‘present-
ing of a concept’.114 Thus, he says in The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and
Wrong, that the 3 fundamental classes are found in Descartes and presentations are
his ideae:
The first fundamental class, Descartes’ ideae, is that of ideas in the broadest sense of this
term, or, as we may also call them, presentations [Vorstellungen]. This includes the concrete
intuitive presentations that are given to us through the senses along with those concepts that
are not properly called sensible.115
Going well beyond Hume, presentations can include abstract ideas that are not yet
being processed in judgments.
In The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, Brentano says that the idea
of the good is based on an intuitive presentation.116 Here he is drawing on Aristotle’s
De anima Book III Chapter 8, and on the medieval dictum that nothing is in the
mind that was not previously in the senses. So he goes on to say that even concepts
like ‘end’, ‘purpose’, and cause ‘have their origin in certain concrete intuitions’.117
Something can present itself as a purpose before it is judged as such. He rejects the
idea that notions, such as cause, should be treated as a priori categories. They are
apprehended in experience. The content of these concrete intuitions can be ‘physi-
cal’ or ‘psychological’ in Brentano’s sense.118 On the other hand, in Descriptive
Psychology Brentano says: ‘every content of an experience is individual’119 so he
109
Ibid., p. 79.
110
Empfindungsvorstellungen, DP, p. 21.
111
ORW, p. 9.
112
Ibid., p. 14.
113
Ibid., p. 14 n. 32.
114
Vorstellen des Begriffs, DP, p. 15.
115
ORW, p. 9.
116
Ibid., p. 8.
117
Ibid., p. 8 n. 18.
118
Ibid., p. 9.
119
DP, p. 149.
94 D. Moran
seemed to think of each appearing as the presentation of an individual entity or

image or sensory object (a sound, a colour, a image in imagination, and so on).
Brentano spends some time rejecting various accounts of ‘presentation’ found in
Herbart, Meyer, and others. He particularly wants to separate presentations from
feelings. Presentations are not feelings but feelings are based on presentations (PES
80). Presentations can be combined or separated at will (e.g. gold mountain) – but
this is different from judging. Judgements involve an act of assertion or denial
directed upon the presentation. He particularly rejects Sigwart’s view that judge-
ments combine or separate presentations.120 It is not clear to whether the mere acts
of combining and separating presentation belongs within the class of Vorstellen, but
that seems to be what Brentano implies since he understands the fundamental class
of judging (Urteilen) to have a different function—that of affirming or denying. If
this is the case, then Brentano is already allowing for something akin to ‘passive
synthesis’ in perception, which Husserl will see as operating already at the level of
sensuous apprehension. Brentano speaks of a ‘presentation of original association’.121
Certain patterns or formations simply are presented as belonging together, and
Brentano’s discussion undoubtedly influenced early followers such as Ehrenfels and
later the Gestalt psychologists. Thus, in Descriptive Psychology, Brentano speaks of
certain colours as being perceived as similar to one another and not just placed
beside one another. Brentano was careful to distinguish or disentangle different ele-
ments of sensory experiences which are often found together. Thus, he discusses the
case of looking at an electric light and have a sensation of beauty as well as a sensa-
tion of pain: “Looking into an electric light, for example, produces simultaneously
a “beautiful,” i.e. pleasant, color phenomenon and a phenomenon of another sort
which is painful.”122
Sensations from different modalities fuse together—those hot food tastes differ-
ently from cold and smell can influence taste and vice versa, and touch can at the
same time deliver smoothness and cold sensations. Brentano even speculates:
It is not surprising, then, if we do not always distinguish precisely between a phenomenon
which is a temperature sensation and another which is a tactile sensation. Perhaps we would
not even distinguish between them at all if they did not ordinarily appear independently of
one another.123
This is an interesting observation, we can identify elements in a composite because

we are familiar with them as individuals. Thus, similarly, Brentano thinks that the
pleasure experienced on hearing a harmonious sound is not pleasure in the sound
but pleasure in the hearing of the sound.124 Brentano here does discuss the
physiological claim that the same nerve endings communicate both sense of touch
and the feeling of warmth. In Aristotelian manner, he concludes that sometimes it is
120
OKRW, p. 50.
121
DP, p. 21.
122
PES, p. 83.
123
Ibid., p. 84.
124
Ibid., p. 90.
language itself that obfuscates: ‘Experience shows that equivocation is one of the
main obstacles to recognizing distinctions’.125
Furthermore, building on the work of earlier psychologists such as Fechner,
Brentano is aware that presentations have to hit a certain threshold in order to be
distinguishable. In addition, apprehensions that are closely connected may not be
distinguished by the subject. Brentano rejects the idea that presentations have (as
Descartes thought) clarity and distinctness. This kind of ‘evidence’ or ‘insight’
(Einsicht) belongs not to appearing but to judging.126 Presentations themselves are
not evident or blind, only judgments are. Yet there is, for Brentano as for Husserl, an
acceptance character found in perception—what Husserl calls ‘belief-in-being’
(Seinsglaube). As Brentano writes in Descriptive Psychology: ‘Man has the innate
tendency to trust his senses. He believes in the actual existence of colours, tones and
whatever else may be contained in a sensory presentation’.127 Much that is found in
Husserl’s phenomenological account on perception can already be found in
Brentano.
4.9 Brentano on Mental Content and Intentional Object
Notoriously, in his discussion of intentionality in Psychology from an Empirical

Standpoint, Brentano tended to identify the content and the object of the intentional
act. Brentano thought of the ‘content’ of a psychic act as what is psychologically
available for inspection. He acknowledges a certain depth in mental content how-
ever, when he distinguishes between the explicit and implicit content in Descriptive
Psychology.128 The explicit content is the whole that is presented: when I see a tree,
the tree is the explicit content but the leaves are also implicitly given as content.129 I
see a face as a totality, but perhaps also can later recall that the person has blue eyes.
Brentano tended to think that this implicit content can be made explicit in inner
perception or thematic reflection.
Very early on, among his students, Brentano was criticised for failing to make a
distinction between the content and the object of an intentional act, for not recognis-
ing that objects are given under a description, for not recognising something like a
Fregean Sinn. Probably the first such intervention came in 1890, when Brentano’s
students, Alois Höfler and Alexius Meinong,130 in their Logic handbook, pointed out
125
Ibid., p. 84.
126
ORW, p. 51.
127
DP, p. 17.
128
This is different from Dennett’s distinction of ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ in The Intentional Stance,
Cambridge, MA: MIT 1987, p. 216. For him, whatever is implied logically from an explicit repre-
sentation is ‘implicit’ in that representation. There is another notion of ‘implicit’ mentioned by
Dennett where it means what someone or system is capable of extracting from the explicit repre-
sentation. Many discussions of content do not make the implicit/explicit/tacit distinction clear.
129
DP, p. 160.
130
Höfler, Alois/Meinong, Alexius (1890), Logik, Tempsky: Prag, Wien, 1890, p. 7.
96 D. Moran
that a distinction must be made between the mental content, on the one hand, and
the actual existent thing on the other. In 1894 Twardowski, in his The Content and
Object of Presentations,131 similarly distinguished between the immanent content
(or mental picture) and the extra-mental object:132 ‘What is presented in a presenta-
tion is its content; what is presented through a presentation is its object’.133 The
content, according to Twardowski, is purely a vehicle to the real object. Eventually,
Husserl came to offer a much more complicated and tiered account of ‘content’ that
distinguished between the ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ intentional contents of acts.
4.10 Husserl’s Emerging Concept of Phenomenology and His

Rejection of Descriptive Psychology
Husserl was particularly taken with Brentano’s project for a descriptive analysis of
the essential features of consciousness as given in his Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint.
In a note [added in a later edition?] in PES Brentano writes that psychology can
ascend to general laws without induction and is as ‘a priori as mathematics’. He
continues:
But while psychology never leaves the domain of concepts based directly on perception,
mathematics and geometry immediately turn to the most complicated conceptual construc-
tions. For example, a concept of an ideal geometrical solid, which is never formed by sim-
ple abstraction but already involves a process of conceptual attribution not directly based on
perception, belongs to such a class of concepts. This is, of course, even more true of a
concept such as “3+n dimensions.” Mathematics, on the other hand, is dependent upon
descriptive psychology insofar as a clarification of its basic concepts and ultimate axioms is
impossible without analysis of consciousness; hence, of course, we also speak of “philoso-
phy of mathematics.”134
Even mathematics is dependent on descriptive psychology. This was surely the

stimulus to Husserl’s initial forays into philosophy with his Philosophy of
Arithmetic (1891).
Husserl’s first book Philosophy of Arithmetic. Logical and Psychological
Investigations,135 which contained his Habilitation thesis, aimed, following
Brentano, at the clarification of arithmetical concepts by elucidating their ‘psycho-
logical origin’. Here Husserl applied Brentanian descriptive psychology to arithme-
tic by identifying the essential mental acts involved in the formation of the concept
131
Twardowski, Kasimir, On the Content and Object of Presentations. A Psychological
Investigation, trans. R. Grossmann, The Hague: Nijhoff 1977).
132
Twardowski, op. cit., p. 7.
133
Twardowski, op. cit., p. 16.
134
PES p. 29 n. 1.
135
Husserl, Edmund, Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890–1901), ed.
L. Eley, Husserliana XII, The Hague: Nijhoff 1970, trans. Dallas Willard, Philosophy of Arithmetic,
Husserl Collected Works series vol. X, Dordrecht: Kluwer 2003. Hereafter ‘PA’ followed by
English pagination and Husserliana volume and page number.
of number. Brentano had distinguished generally between what he termed ‘genuine’

or ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) presentations, where the object is directly given, and non-
genuine, ‘inauthentic’ or ‘symbolic’ (uneigentlich, symbolisch) presentations,
where the object is referred to in some kind of indirect, empty, or symbolic manner.
According to Brentano, large numbers and irrational numbers as well as concepts
like God are given in such inauthentic presentations. Husserl took over this distinc-
tion in his Philosophy of Arithmetic, which is divided into two parts: Part One, ‘The
Genuine Concepts of Unity, Plurality, and Number’; Part Two, the symbolic or inau-
thentic intuitions of higher numbers. Authentic or genuine presentations present the
object as it appears directly in the intuition (Husserl’s example is the house I actu-
ally see before me), in the flesh, as it were, whereas I have a merely symbolic or
inauthentic intuition of a house described to me as the house on the corner of such
and such a street.136
Husserl’s basic principle, which was also Brentano’s, was that ‘no concept can
be thought without a foundation [Fundierung] in a concrete intuition’.137 He was
seeking the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) or ‘source’ (Quelle) of ‘mathematical presentations
[Vorstellungen]’, as he later put it in the Foreword to his Logical Investigations,
based on the testimony of ‘inner experience’,138 for instance, in regard to the manner
certain kinds of relations are intuitively apprehended. According to Husserl, the
concept of number is derived from the concept of ‘collective combination’139 that is
a fundamental relation of a new kind, which he will call— following Brentano—a
‘mental’ relation. Husserl is invoking a modified version of Brentano’s distinction
between the ‘physical’ and the ‘mental’ (PA, p. 70 n. 1; Hua XII 68). As he puts it,
his descriptive psychology seeks to gain insight from the experienced phenomena
themselves,140 Many years later, in his Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal
and Transcendental Logic, 1929),141 Husserl described his early efforts in the
Philosophy of Arithmetic as follows:
… presented an initial attempt to go back to the spontaneous activities of collecting and
counting, in which collections (‘sums’, ‘sets’) and cardinal numbers are given in the man-
ner characteristic of something that is being generated originaliter, and thereby to gain
clarity [Klarheit] respecting the proper, the authentic, sense of the concepts fundamental to
the theory of sets and of cardinal numbers. It was therefore, in my later terminology, a
phenomenologico-constitutional investigation.142
Husserl is now rewriting ‘descriptive psychology’ as ‘phenomenological constitu-

tional investigation.
136
PA, p. 205; Hua XII 193.
137
Ibid., p. 83; Hua XII 79.
138
innere Erfahrung, PA, p. 69; Hua XII 66.
139
kollektive Verbindung, PA, p. 21; Hua XII 20.
140
PA, p. 23; Hua XII 22.
141
Husserl, Edmund, Edmund, Formale und transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen. Husserliana
XVII, The Hague: Nijhoff 1974; trans. Dorion Cairns. Formal and Transcendental Logic, The
Hague: Nijhoff 1969. Hereafter ‘FTL’ followed by English pagination and Husserliana volume and
page number.
142
FTL, pp. 86–87; Hua XVII 90–91.
98 D. Moran
4.11 Husserl’s Departure from Descriptive Psychology

(c. 1902)
In the Second Volume of the Logical Investigations (1901) Husserl makes devastat-
ing criticisms of Brentano. In the Fifth Investigation, he lists his ‘deviations’ from
Brentano,143 his ‘departures’ (Abweichungen) both from his master’s ‘convictions’
and from his technical ‘vocabulary’. Husserl specifically challenges Brentano’s fun-
damental notion that ‘presentations’ (Vorstellungen) are a distinct class of psychic
acts on which all other acts are founded. Instead, he argues that each class of ‘objec-
tivating acts’ has its own kind of object-intending and ‘mode of givenness’ of the
intentional object. He rejects Brentano’s immanentist understanding of ‘intentional
inexistence’.
In the Sixth Investigation, he separates ‘what is indubitably significant in
Brentano’s thought-motivation from what is erroneous in its elaboration’.144 In a
very late letter written to Marvin Farber, 18 June 1937, Husserl claimed that
Brentano was blind to his own discovery and failed to see what was really at stake
in the intentionality: ‘the proper problems of intentionality never dawned on him.
He [Brentano] even failed to see that no given experience of consciousness can be
described without a description of appertaining an “intentional object as such” (for
example, that this perception of the desk can only be described, when I describe this
desk as what and just as it is perceived). Brentano had no inkling of intentional
implication, of intentional modifications, of problems of constitution, etc. …’145 The
mature Husserl similarly remarks in his 1929 Formal and Transcendental Logic that
Brentano’s discovery of intentionality ‘never led to seeing in it a complex of perfor-
mances, which are included as sedimented history in the currently constituted inten-
tional unity and its current manners of givenness – a history that one can always
uncover following a strict method’.146
Husserl challenges Brentano’s account of the intentional object and also the
intentional ‘relation’. The intentional object is never a component piece of a lived
experience; rather lived experiences are essentially self-transcending, i.e. pointing
beyond themselves. Later, in Ideas I §36, Husserl reiterates that intentionality is
neither a real relation with an existent object nor a ‘psychological’ relation between
consciousness and its internal ‘content’, rather intentionality is inherently disclosive
of objects that transcend it. In fact, for Husserl, all objects of thought, including
those of fantasy and memory, are mind-transcendent. He writes in Ideas (1913): “…
as a matter of absolutely unconditional universality or necessity, a thing cannot be
143
LU II: 353 n.1.
144
LU II, p. 340.
145
See Cho, Kah Kyung (1990), ‘Phenomenology as Cooperative Task: Husserl-Farber
Correspondence during 1936–37,’ in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50,
Supplement, pp. 36–43, esp. p. 37.
146
FTL, p. 245.
given in any possible perception, in any possible consciousness at all as immanent

to it in a real [reell] manner.”147
Intentionality is better understood not as object-targeting but as investing some-
thing with a sense, ‘sense-giving’, or ‘sense-bestowal’ (Sinngebung), or ‘sense-
explication’ (Auslegung), since, in many cases, including the primal case of
perception, the constituted object simply appears or manifests itself in a meaningful
manner to a seemingly passive perceiving subject.
In his Introduction to the Investigations, Husserl explicitly identifies phenome-
nology with epistemological critique and ‘descriptive psychology’: “Phenomenology
is descriptive psychology. Epistemological criticism is therefore in essence psychol-
ogy, or at least capable of being built on a psychological foundation.”148
Husserl writes in the First Edition:
Phenomenology represents a field of neutral researches, in which several sciences have their
roots. On the one hand, it serves as preparatory to psychology as an empirical science. It
analyses and describes - in the specific guise of a phenomenology of thinking and knowing –
the experiences of presentation, judgement and knowledge, experiences which should find
their genetic clarification, their investigation according to empirical lawful connections.149
In 1902 Husserl was already conceiving of phenomenology in opposition to descrip-

tive psychology, a move more clearly underscored in the Second Edition of the
Logical Investigations, when descriptive psychology is seen as inescapably linked
to naturalism and to the modern psychological tradition since Locke. In his
1902/1903 lectures on epistemology, Husserl was already clarifying the distinction
between descriptive psychology and phenomenology, which he characterises as a
‘pure theory of essences’ (reine Wesenslehre).150 In 1903, in his Bericht über
deutsche Schriften zur Logik in den Jahren 1895–1899, he explicitly repudiated his
initial characterisation of the work as a set of investigations in ‘descriptive
psychology’.151 Repeating the language of the Introduction to the Logical
Investigations, he calls for an ‘illumination’ (Aufklärung) of knowledge indepen-
dent of metaphysics and of all relation to natural, real being, suggesting he is already
moving towards the reduction:
147
Ideas I § 42, pp. 73–74; Hua III/1 76.
148
LU, I, Intro., p. 176; Hua XIX/1 24.
149
LU, I, Intro. § 1, p. 166; Hua XIX/1 7.
150
Two quotations (Ms. F I 26/83b and F I 26/12a) from the manuscript of Husserl’s lectures on
Erkenntnistheorie are reproduced in the Editor’s Introduction to Hua XIX/1, pp. xxx-xxxi.
151
Husserl, Edmund (1903/1904), “Bericht über deutsche Schriften zur Logik in den Jahren
1895–1899,” in: Archives für systematische Philosophie Vol. 9, and Vol. 10, reprinted in Edmund
Husserl, Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. B. Rang, Husserliana XXII, The Hague:
Nijhoff 1979, pp. 162–258, trans. D. Willard, ‘Report on German Writings in Logic From the Years
1895–1899’, in: E. Husserl, Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, trans.
Dallas Willard, Collected Works V, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1994, pp. 207–302. Hereafter ‘Early
Writings’ and English page number; followed by Husserliana volume and page number.
100 D. Moran
This illumination requires a phenomenology of knowledge; for the lived experiences of

knowing, wherein the origin of the logical Ideas lies, have to be fixed upon and analysed in
the illumination, but in removal from all interpretation that goes beyond the real (reellen)
content of those lived experiences.152
Husserl continues:
Phenomenology therefore must not be designated as “descriptive psychology” without
some further qualification. In the rigorous and true sense it is not descriptive psychology at
all. Its descriptions do not concern lived experiences, or classes thereof, of empirical per-
sons; for of persons – of myself and of others, of lived experiences which are “mine” and
“thine” – it knows nothing, assumes nothing. Concerning such matters it poses no ques-
tions, attempts no definitions, makes no hypotheses. In phenomenological description one
views that which, in the strongest of senses, is given, just as it is in itself.153
Husserl goes on to say that phenomenology aims to arrive at a clear and distinct
understanding of the essences of the concepts and laws of logic through “adequate
abstraction based on intuition”, a conception of ideating abstraction which will be
sharpened over the years (in Ideas I, for instance).
In the Second Edition of the Investigations Husserl added the following
paragraph:
Assertions of phenomenological fact can never be epistemologically grounded in psycho-
logical experience, nor in internal perception in the ordinary sense of the word, but only in
ideational, phenomenological inspection of essence. The latter has its illustrative start in
inner intuition, but such inner intuition need not be actual internal perception or other inner
experience, e.g. recollection: its purposes are as well or better served by any free fictions of
inner imagination [in freiester Fiktion gestaltende Phantasie] provided they have enough
intuitive clarity.154
As we have seen Husserl’s phenomenology moved far beyond Brentano’s descrip-

tive psychology. But Brentano’s descriptive psychology itself evolved considerably
in the twenty between 1874 and 1895 (when he began publicly to use the term ‘psy-
chognosy’). In the end, both Brentano and Husserl were committed to a non-
reductive sui generis exploration of the ‘life of consciousness’ (Bewusstseinsleben)
understood as a dynamic complex of essential features that can be apprehended by
reflective analysis.
152
Early Writings, p. 251; Hua XXII 206.
153
Ibid., p. 251; Hua XXII 206–7.
154
LU V § 27, II p. 607; Hua XIX/1456.

Brentano S Concept of Descriptive Psycho

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Chapter 4

Brentano’s Concept of Descriptive

Abstract In this paper, I begin by outlining Franz Brentano’s connections with

Keywords Brentano · Newman · Dilthey · Descriptive psychology · Inner

In memory of Dale Jacquette

4.1 Franz Brentano’s Family Connection to Newman’s

Before discussing Brentano’s descriptive psychology, I would like to draw your

Renouf, a self-taught Egyptologist, and specialist in hieroglyphics, later became

Robin Rollinger who is currently editing Brentano’s 1884–1885 lectures on Die

4.2 Brentano’s New Psychology

I shall now examine what precisely Brentano meant by ‘descriptive psychology’

Brentano therefore sees his descriptive psychology as in direct continuity with

descriptive psychology to a chemical analysis of a substance into its ultimate, sim-

4.3 Husserl’s Conception of Descriptive Psychology

intentionality.31 As Brentano says, consciousness is always ‘having- objectively’

Undoubtedly Husserl’s conception of descriptive psychology came directly from

The second volume of the Logical Investigations, subtitled Investigations in

Husserl was particularly drawn to Brentano’s efforts to reform classical Aristotelian

Consciousness is a unified ‘complex’ (Zusammenhang, Komplex), a seamless

4.4 Wilhelm Dilthey’s Concept of Descriptive Psychology

4.5 Brentano’s Mereological ‘ABC of Consciousness’

which more complex phenomena arise’, as he puts it in Psychology from the an

On this account descriptive psychology is opposed to psychophysics and to

distinction between physiological and descriptive psychology is different from the

Wundt is critical of any reliance on a purely descriptive psychology or what he

Wundt is proposing a psychology informed by physiology: “In so far as physio-

According to Brentano, psychological laws are sui generis; they cannot be

4.6 The Priority of Descriptive Psychology as a Science

This is a peculiarity of Brentano’s concept of the psychological. Furthermore,

Brentano is a great admirer of the Aristotelian aporetic method:

4.7 Introspection and Inner Perception

In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano claims to be the first to have

4.8 The Fundamental Class of Presentations

seeing a colour, feeling warmth or cold—‘as well as similar states of imagination’.109

seemed to think of each appearing as the presentation of an individual entity or

This is an interesting observation, we can identify elements in a composite because

4.9 Brentano on Mental Content and Intentional Object

Notoriously, in his discussion of intentionality in Psychology from an Empirical

4.10 Husserl’s Emerging Concept of Phenomenology and His

Even mathematics is dependent on descriptive psychology. This was surely the

of number. Brentano had distinguished generally between what he termed ‘genuine’

Husserl is now rewriting ‘descriptive psychology’ as ‘phenomenological constitu-

4.11 Husserl’s Departure from Descriptive Psychology

given in any possible perception, in any possible consciousness at all as immanent

In 1902 Husserl was already conceiving of phenomenology in opposition to descrip-

This illumination requires a phenomenology of knowledge; for the lived experiences of

As we have seen Husserl’s phenomenology moved far beyond Brentano’s descrip-

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