Franz Brentano: Critical Assessment. Vol. 4. Ethics, Aesthetics, Religion (Routledge Critical Assessment of Leading Philosophers)

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was a leading philosopher and psychologist of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the impact of his scholarship was so great that he became synonymous with a school of thought and a new approach in scientific philosophy. The Brentano School stood against the Idealistic and post-Kantian German tradition and Brentano played a crucial role in the founding of Austrian philosophy. He had an enormous impact on the work of Husserl and Heidegger, as well as on Moore’s Ethics and Stout and Russell’s analysis of mind. In particular, situated between the phenomenology movement and the analytic tradition, the concept of intentionality was redefined by Brentano and has been—and remains—a key concept of twentieth- and twentieth-first century philosophy of mind. But Brentano not only reshaped philosophy of mind; he was also a remarkable and innovative thinker in several other fields of philosophy, and recent debate in metaethics, metaphysics, and the history of analytic philosophy shows a strong resurgence of interest in Brentano’s thought. Published to coincide with the centenary of Brentano’s death, this four-volume collection, a new title from Routledge Major Works, provides an essential intellectual tool for the exegetical evaluation of all aspects of Brentano’s work. Bringing together early reviews and reactions from his contemporaries—many of which have never before been translated into English—as well as the best critical assessments of Brentano’s work, this ‘mini library’ provides Brentano scholars, historians of philosophy and psychology, and phenomenologists, with a rigorous historical appraisal of Brentano’s thought and influence. Brentano’s relationships with Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological tradition are examined in depth, alongside investigations of key themes from his work on Aristotle, medieval and modern philosophy, philosophy of mind, logic, ontology, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history. This fourth volume collects a bundle of very helpful articles focusing mainly on moral philosophy, aesthetics, and religion. In comparison to his other contributions, these areas remain only relatively studied among Brentano scholars, and are largely unexplored among contemporary philosophers more broadly. For Brentano, the study of the human good, and the beauty, requires the study of psychology; ethics, aesthetics, and religion require, thus, a science of the mind. Divided into two sections: 1) Ethics and value theory, and 2) Aesthetics, history, religion, this volume surveys intuitionism in Brentano’s moral philosophy, his examination of the history of ethical theories, and his theory of beauty, based on a series of lectures on practical philosophy and aesthetics delivered at the University of Vienna from 1875 to 1894, before his move to Italy.