INTRODUCTION

It is well known that Brentano classified “psychical phenomena” as presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate. Presentations are presentations of objects, although their objects may not exist. One might say roughly that presentations are the vehicles of content, but a presentation is not propositional in form and does not embody any stance of the subject toward the content in question. Judgments are affirmations or denials of presentations. Thus they are based on presentations but are not a species of them. It is of course judgments that are true or false. Phenomena of the third class are also based on presentations, and, like judgments, also embody a stance of the subject toward the content in question. Brentano sometimes characterizes this as Gefallen oder Missfallen, which might be rendered roughly as a pro- or con-attitude. Such attitudes can also be correct or incorrect, an idea that is the starting point of Brentano's ethics. However, phenomena of love and hate will play almost no role in what follows. The three-fold classification is presented in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874 and Brentano held to it for the remainder of his career.

THE INTENTIONALITY THESIS

Among Brentano's most important and philosophically influential achievements is his thesis of the intentionality of mind. To say that thought is intentional is to say that it intends or is about something, that it aims at or is directed upon an intended object. Intentionality is thus the aboutness of thought, the relation whereby a psychological state intends or refers to an intended object.

Brentano argues that all psychological phenomena and only psychological phenomena are intentional. He holds that to believe is to believe something; it is for a belief state, a particular kind of mental act, to intend or be about whatever is believed. The intended object of a belief is often a certain state of affairs, that today is Tuesday or that God exists, if the belief is that today is Tuesday or that God exists. The situation is the same with respect to other psychological states, such as desire, hope, fear, doubt, expectation, love, hate. To desire is to desire something, to be directed in thought to the object of desire, whatever the object may happen to be. In what is probably the most famous and undoubtedly most frequently quoted passage of his (1874) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), Brentano maintains:

BRENTANO’S SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Brentano is among the most important yet under-appreciated philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He led an intellectual revolution that sought to reverse what was then the prevalent post-Kantian trend of German-Austrian philosophy in the direction of an Aristotelian scientific methodology. At the same time, he made valuable contributions to philosophical psychology, metaphysics, ontology, value theory, epistemology, the reform of syllogistic logic, philosophical theology and theodicy, and the history of philosophy and philosophical methodology.

By revitalizing Austrian scientific philosophy, Brentano and his school simultaneously laid the groundwork for twentieth-century philosophy of science as it came to fruition in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, for the Gegenstandstheorie or object theory of Alexius Meinong and his students in the Graz School, and for phenomenology, notably in the work of Edmund Husserl, and indirectly in such later thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the borders of the German-speaking world, Brentano’s philosophy had a profound impact on the course of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, as evinced in tributes to his influence by, among many others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Gilbert Ryle, G. F. Stout, and Roderick M. Chisholm.

CONCEPTUALISM (1862–1874)

It is often claimed that the beginnings of Brentano's ontology were Aristotelian in nature; but this claim is only partially true. Certainly the young Brentano adopted many elements of Aristotle's metaphysics, and he was deeply influenced by the Aristotelian way of doing philosophy. But he always interpreted Aristotle's ideas in his own fashion. He accepted them selectively, and he used them in the service of ends that would not have been welcomed by Aristotle himself. The present paper is an exposition of the development of Brentano's ontology, beginning with the Lectures on Metaphysics first delivered by Brentano in Würzburg in 1867 and concluding with his late work from 1904-17.

Being and truth

Aristotle distinguished various ways in which being can be predicated.1 There is first of all the ontologically serious use of the word “is”: being in the sense of the categories, also called “real being” in what follows. The two other ways of saying “is” relate respectively to what Aristotle called “purely accidental being” and “being in the sense of being true.” It is especially the notion of being in the sense of being true that will concern us in what follows.

BRENTANO’S RECOVERY OF THE INTENTIONAL

The topic of “intentionality” is a well-known quagmire. There seems to be no doubt that the Scholastic intentio had fallen into disuse in modern philosophy until it was recovered by Franz Brentano in an arresting way in the original edition (1874) of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. There, Brentano recovers intentionality - or, adhering to the text, “intentional inexistence” - as the essential nerve of an empirical psychology centered on describing the various kinds of “presentations [Vorstellungen] and other activities which are based upon presentations and which, like presentations, are only perceivable through inner perception.” These activities, Brentano says, belong to their “substantial bearer,” the soul (in Aristotle's sense of a certain “form of life”[physis, morphé], which Brentano follows), “the subject of consciousness” (as Oskar Kraus adds, without prejudging whether it is “spiritual or material” in being a “substantial substrate”).

INTRODUCTION

The nineteenth was logic's breakthrough century. At its beginning, logic had just been claimed by Kant, in justified ignorance of Leibniz's unpublished advances, not to have advanced since antiquity, and the laws of logic were soon to be submitted to the indignities of Hegel and to suffer the scorn of Mill. What started anachronistically in the 1820s with Richard Whately as a modest “back [beyond Locke] to Aristotle” movement in Oxford, trying to reinstate scholastic ways of doing logic after the long dark centuries since Ramus, inspired others lacking the desire to turn the clock back to reconsider logic and its role. This gathered momentum, and what began as a revival turned into a reform and then became a palace-storming revolution. Bolzano's obscurely published and tragically ignored 1837 masterpiece Wissenschaftslehre invented modern semantics, while ten years later in 1847 Boole and DeMorgan used mathematical methods and algebraic analogies to propel the study of inference out of the humanities and into mathematics.

INTRODUCTION

Though Brentano is a highly significant philosopher in his own right as well as the teacher of various outstanding philosophers, he is most widely known as the teacher of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. After Husserl had received his doctorate in mathematics in 1882, he made a career shift to philosophy in 1884 when he decided, under the influence of Thomas Masaryk, to attend lectures of Brentano in Vienna. He continued to do so until 1886, when Brentano recommended Husserl as a diligent student of philosophy to Carl Stumpf in Halle where Husserl was to join the staff in the following year. In the course of the 1890s, however, Husserl changed his philosophical orientation until he finally made his “breakthrough” to phenomenology with the Logical Investigations (1900/1). In later years, in spite of his repeated admissions of Brentano's profound influence on him, he only distanced himself more and more from Brentanian philosophy, while Brentano himself was rather dismayed with Husserl's innovations.

INTRODUCTION: THE PARADIGM OF PATRIARCHY

It is a truism that the family forms the basic unit of any society and, at the same time, reflects its ruling principles, values, and views, and this is certainly true of Rome. As in all societies, the structure of the basic family unit was made up of a complex compound of criteria and factors that, in their relative importance to the whole as well as individually, could and did differ considerably at any given period and were subject to change over time. Legal status, age and gender, wealth, social standing and rank, traditions and ideologies, attitudes and patterns of behaviour based on them determined the position of a Roman, male or female, in society as well as in his or her family. Republican society at large was characterized by the omnipresence of hierarchies and of overlapping power relations. Distinctions of status and rank abounded, not only between Roman citizens or provincials and the mass of slaves with no rights, but also between magistrates and ordinary citizens, between generals and soldiers, patrons and clients, senators and the plebs in the Roman street, and even within the privileged classes.

The image and idea of the Roman family was deeply influenced by a combination of hierarchy and power. At least in law and in ideology, all relations within the household centred on authority, obligation, and coercion. The aristocratic value system was defined by a number of traditional factors: superiority, rank, authority, talent, and achievement in the service to the state (res publica), on the one hand, balanced by subordination, acceptance, and deference, on the other.

At issue in a short survey of republican art is the lack of many longer ones, as if there were no art to be discussed. The opposite is true: for nearly half a millennium, the Latin cities, Rome preeminent among them, expressed themselves both intensely and fluently, with art, architecture, and landscape architecture, private and public, in coins and engraved gems, metal and stone images, mosaic and painting, in the brilliantly modeled terracottas of houses and public buildings. Later Roman ages cherished, recorded, and imitated that patrimony and held in respect the memory of the leaders who put art into their cities - even the memory of those who created it, including that interesting generation of early republican nobles who made monumental paintings. But how was that art “Roman”? This chapter offers one concise but nuanced partial response to this question. What follows is an attempt to explore some of the distinctive variety and characteristics of republican art, stressing its public functions for Roman society. (For help in understanding the discussion of Rome's monuments and architecture, consult Fig. 19, which consists of a map of the entire city and a detailed view of the center of the city.)

Republican Rome had no written constitution. It did, however, have an array of remarkably tenacious continuing institutions (in the broadest sense of the term), some of which were or at least seemed virtually primeval. And at all times it had men who were willing to make confident assertions - as senators, magistrates, priests, or specialists in jurisprudence, or in more than one of these roles at once - about what was legally possible under an often fuzzy and ever evolving political and administrative system. A few went a bit further than ad hoc pronouncements. Certainly by c. 200 B.C. the Roman elite was taking an academic interest in the city-state's legal history. In the developed Republic, at any rate, some important colleges of priests maintained books of precedents; the senate's past decrees could be consulted in written form. Cicero's On Laws, to single out just one of his contributions to political philosophy, actually contains a short (idealizing) constitution, a theoretical piece that treats Rome's magistracies and some aspects of the state religion. One must add that a well-connected outsider, the Greek Polybius, writing in the mid second century B.C., left us an invaluable, though frustratingly selective and overschematic, sketch of the Roman state as he saw it.

The history of republican Italy is one of conquest and Roman expansion but also one of many different peoples and communities and the strategies they used both to integrate with and to resist the influence of Rome. What it is emphatically not is a linear process of Roman expansion and the disappearance of local cultures and identities. Ancient Italy was not an ethnic or political unit but a region of extreme diversity. It contained many different ethnic groups, each with its own language, culture, economy, and forms of social and political organisation (Fig. 8), and as Roman power began to expand, complex systems for controlling conquered areas and mediating relations with other states evolved piecemeal. As a result, Roman Italy, even after it became a politically unified entity in 90 B.C., had a high level of cultural diversity and strong regional identities that coexisted with central control and Roman influence.

One of the most central — but also one of the most problematic — concepts with which the historian of Roman Italy has to grapple is that of Romanisation. The process of cultural, as opposed to political, integration with Rome is notoriously difficult to define in theory and to identify in action. Roman culture itself was neither unified nor static but rather disparate and constantly changing. It also operated in different ways at different levels of society. Roman cultural influence may have meant something very different to different social groups.

The half millennium that runs from the revolution of 509 to the beginning of the principate saw the transformation of the Roman state from a regional power into a world empire. Thus, to speak of the Roman economy in the singular is misleading, as there is little justification, other than the common denominator of the political institutions referred to as “republican,” to consider in one and the same chapter an economic system that underwent the most drastic changes, while showing endless diversity with regard to times and places, structures and scales, or actors and goods. Clearly, however, a family of small farmers settled in the vicinity of Rome throughout the period would have seen much less change than their counterparts in the more rapidly developing area surrounding Paris from the Renaissance until our time. Although a substantial part of the population in Antiquity remained involved in agricultural production at all times, the Roman people of the republican period went through a series of social and economic revolutions of global historical significance. Roman imperialism in Italy and around the Mediterranean Sea was accompanied or followed by economic and fiscal exploitation of newly formed overseas provinces. It resulted in uneven demographic growth, the enrichment of the upper classes, some degree of urbanization linked with colonization, and the development of municipal institutions.

TIBERIUS GRACCHUS AND THE CONFLICT OVER LAND REFORM

When Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus took office as tribune of the plebs on 10 December 134 B.C., everything in the Roman Republic seemed to be in fine working order. Rome's dangerous rival Carthage had been destroyed; the kingdom of Macedonia had become a province; the whole world of the Hellenistic states was now under Roman control. Rome faced the annoyance of a slave revolt in Sicily and a guerilla war around the town of Numantia in Spain, but neither conflict posed a serious threat, and both were already in the process of being brought to a successful conclusion. In the city of Rome itself, the leading men of the most prominent political families, the nobility of office (nobilitas), dominated political life from their seats in the senate. They knew how to bring one or the other recalcitrant magistrate to heel, and the same applied to the occasional tribune of the plebs who might prove too independent. They were flexible enough to integrate talented and ambitious social climbers into their ranks and clever enough to include all the citizens in the making of political decisions in the various types of assemblies - and particularly to entrust to them the choice between the rival candidates in the competition for political office.

Less than a year later, everything had fundamentally changed, according to Appian of Alexandria, writing in the preface to his history of the Roman civil wars. A political clash had ended in assassination and death; further fighting would follow, first in the city and then for the city, eventually culminating in the short-lived domination of Caesar and finally in the establishment of the principate by Augustus.