McDonnell, Cyril (2023) On the Idea of a Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint: Brentano's Understanding of Post-Kantian Philosophy and Nineteenth-Century Science. Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, 67 (1). pp. 45-74. ISSN 1220-5400

Preview

Download (814kB) | Preview

Abstract

All of Brentano's students recall the burning sense of a mission to render philosophy a science that permeated the core of their mentor's being and teaching, but what kind of science does Brentano defend for philosophy in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) and new science of descriptive psychology which he subsequently elaborated in his lectures in philosophy at the University of Vienna in the 1880s? Brentano would like us to believe that he is continuing the perennial science of philosophy as inaugurated by the ancient Greeks, and by Aristotle in particular, into the nineteenth century. This article, however, argues that once Brentano accepts the status of the newly emerging natural science of psychology and adopts in the 1870s a Humean philosophical approach to the mind and its contents, he cannot, despite his best efforts, establish the continuity of philosophy as philosophia perennis that exists before and after the modern conception of natural science. He thus defends for the science of philosophy instead, a psychology from an empirical standpoint that is fully modern in temperament, yet one that is neither fully empirical or rational in Hume or Kant's sense nor a capitulation to the method of the natural sciences in general and fledgling natural science of empirical psychology in particular.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	philosophia perennis; philosophy as science; natural science; empirical psychology; descriptive psychology; hermeneutic science;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > Philosophy
Item ID:	18821
Depositing User:	Dr Cyril McDonnell
Date Deposited:	03 Sep 2024 09:54
Journal or Publication Title:	Revue Roumaine de Philosophie
Publisher:	The Publishing House of the Romanian Academy
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads