Brentano’s Concept of Descriptive Psychology

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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 opposition 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 psychology (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 intentional 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 conceptions 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 descriptive 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.