School of Brentano - Definition and Overview

The School of Brentano refers to the philosophers and psychologists who studied with Franz Brentano and were essentially influenced by him. While it was never a school in the traditional sense, Brentano tried to maintain some cohesion in the school. However, precisely his most famous students (Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl), were those that ultimately moved most radically beyond his theories.

Among the School of Brentano are counted (place and period they studied with Brentano):

• Carl Stumpf (Würzburg, 1866 - 1870)
• Edmund Husserl (Vienna, 1884 - 1886 )
• Alexius Meinong (Vienna, 1875 - 1878)
• Christian von Ehrenfels
• Kazimierz Twardowski (Vienna, 1885 - 1889)
• Anton Marty (Würzburg, 1866 - 1870)
• Alois Höfler
• Tomás Masaryk
• Sigmund Freud

Brentano's students were in their turn founders of new schools or movements:

• Stumpf taught Aron Gurwitsch and became the head of the Berlin School (Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler)
• Husserl founded the phenomenological movement, influencing:
  • Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach)
  • existential phenomenology (Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger)
• Meinong was the head of the Graz School and influenced among others Stephan Witasek, Alois Höfler, Vittorio Benussi and Bertrand Russell.
• Christian von Ehrenfels is credited with the introduction of the notion of Gestalt, which led to the establishment of Gestalt psychology.
• Twardowski was the teacher of Tadeusz Kotarbinski and became the "father of Polish logic" as patron of the Lwów-Warsaw School of logic (Jan Lukasiewicz, Stanislaw Leśniewski, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Alfred Tarski)
• Marty and his disciple Karl Bühler developed an detailed theory of language, which influenced Reinach (who developed a theory of speech acts long before John Austin).

Also scholars such as Bertrand Russell, Roderick Chisholm, George Edward Moore, Gilbert Ryle, John Searle have propagated Brentano's influence to analytic philosophy through their research, editions and publications.

Through the works and teachings of his pupils the philosophy of Franz Brentano has been spread far and wide and indirectly influenced many if not most of the debates in contemporary philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Bibliography

• The School of Franz Brentano (ed. L. Albertazzi, M. Libardi & R. Poli), Kluwer, Dordrecht 1996. ISBN 0792337662
• The Cambridge Companion to Brentano (ed. D. Jacquette), Cambridge University Press 2004. ISBN 0521007658
• Rollinger, Robin D., Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano Kluwer, Dordrecht 1999. ISBN 0-7923-5684-5
• Barry Smith Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/book/austrian_philosophy/) Open Court Publishing Company Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois 1994