Franz Brentano
German philosopher and psychologist (1838–1917), born in Marienberg am Rhein into an intellectually distinguished Catholic family — a nephew of the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano — ordained a Catholic priest in 1864 before formally rejecting the dogma of papal infallibility proclaimed by the First Vatican Council (1870), a decision of conscience that cost him his ecclesiastical position and, ultimately, his chair at the University of Würzburg, and which led him to move to Vienna, where for two decades he taught philosophy with extraordinary pedagogical influence over an entire generation of brilliant disciples — Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Kazimierz Twardowski, Sigmund Freud — who would go on to found entire philosophical and psychological schools. His most decisive philosophical contribution, set out in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), is the concept of 'intentionality', recovered from medieval scholastic philosophy but reformulated as the distinguishing criterion of all mental phenomena: every psychic act — thinking, desiring, judging, perceiving — is characterised by always being 'directed toward' an object (the object's 'intentional inexistence' within the act), a feature that radically distinguishes mental phenomena from physical phenomena, which lack this capacity to refer to something distinct from themselves. This concept of intentionality, taken up and directly transformed by Edmund Husserl into the foundation of all twentieth-century phenomenology, makes Brentano the indirect intellectual father of the entire continental phenomenological and existentialist tradition. Brentano also developed an influential threefold classification of psychic phenomena — presentations, judgements and love-hate phenomena (emotion and will) — and an intuitionist ethics grounded in the immediate perception of correct and incorrect values, work that exerted notable influence, through his student G.E. Moore, on early-twentieth-century British analytic metaethics.