Theory and History of Ontology
by Raul Corazzon - e-mail: raul.corazzon[at]formalontology.it
For an overview see the Index of the Pages, the SITE MAP or the Alphabetical Index of the
Philosophers: A-F - G-O - P-Z; You can also
download this page as
Table of Contemporary Ontologists 
(click on the image to see the PDF file)
Index of the Section: "The Rediscovery of Ontology in Contemporary Thought"
Table of Formal and Descriptivists Ontologists (PDF - from Bernard Bolzano to present time)
Ontologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries (a selection of critical judgments about some of the greatest philosophers of the recent past)
Living Ontologists (a list of authors with an interest in ontology, with synthetic bibliographies)
Selected bibliography on Brentano's Ontology: A-K
Selected bibliography on Brentano's Ontology: L-Z
"Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and philosophy of mind, ontology, ethics and the philosophy of language. He also published several books on the history of philosophy, especially Aristotle, and contented that philosophy proceeds in cycles of advance and decline. He is best known for reintroducing the scholastic concept of intentionality into philosophy and proclaiming it as the characteristic mark of the mental. His teachings, especially those on what he called descriptive psychology, influenced the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century, but because of his concern for precise statement and his sensitivity to the dangers of the undisciplined use of philosophical language, his work also bears affinities to analytic philosophy."
From: Roderick M. Chisholm and Peter Simons - "Brentano, Franz Clemens" in: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Edited by Edward Craig - London, Routledge 1998.
"Brentano never presented his philosophy in completed form. Most of his doctrines are known to us from writings published after his death, and these do not contain any rounded out statement of his views. Brentano was not among those who in a moment of intuition sketch the architectonics of a system, leaving the relevant details to be fitted into it later. His research, always problem-oriented, began with individual questions, then went on to seek an absolutely certain, or if this could not be obtained, at least a probable, solution for the difficulties encountered along the way. Nor did he hesitate to revise his previous conceptions on the basis of advances in knowledge. The 'will to truth' checked the growth of a 'will to construct', and prevented the congealing of earlier ideas.
Brentano's significance for contemporary philosophy is still singularly underestimated. There is a striking disparity between the very great effect he has had on present-day philosophy and the relatively meager attention paid his teachings in current philosophical instruction and research. For Brentano is a center from which threads extend in the most varied directions. In the first place, the entire philosophy of phenomenology would be inconceivable without him. He was the teacher of Husserl (on whom he had an influence that should not be underestimated) and was thus the spiritual grandfather, so to speak, of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger. Secondly, his work in ontology and metaphysics, notably his analysis of categories and his penetrating studies of Aristotle, decisively influenced the contemporary philosophies of Being (even if very indirectly in part). Finally, his method - especially in the study of the logic of language, which he considers the starting-point in philosophy bears a remarkable resemblance in many respects to the procedure of present day empiricism, and particularly to that of analytic philosophy in Britain and the U.S.A. It is difficult to say how much the investigations conducted in these countries owe to his stimulating ideas."
From: Wolfgang Stegmüller - "Main currents in contemporary German, British, and American philosophy" - Dordrecht, Reidel Publishing Co. , 1969. p. 24.
"Franz Brentano did not like to publish books; as he once said, he hated the "secondary work" that was connected with proof-reading, referencing of quotations, etc. He thus left the publication of his literary remains to his disciples. Indeed, after his death (1917) Alfred Kastil and Oskar Kraus undertook the publication of his literary remains and, in the time permitted to them, carried it out with great loyalty and dedication. In the years 1922 through 1934, there appeared in Felix Meiner's Philosophische Bibliothek ten volumes of Brentano's works; the editor's rich annotations are invaluable for understanding Brentano's lectures and the development of his thoughts. After Kastil's death the work of publication was taken over by Franziska Meyer-Hillebrand, his disciple."
From: Hugo Bergmann - "Brentano on the history of Greek philosophy" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27, 1967, pp. 94-99. p. 94.
"Brentano's first concern in psychology was to find a characteristic which separates psychological from non-psychological or 'physical' phenomena. It was in connection with this attempt that he first developed his celebrated doctrine of intentionality as the decisive constituent of psychological phenomena. The sentence in which he introduces the term 'intentionality' is of such crucial importance that I shall render it here in literal translation: Every psychical phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or sometimes the mental) inexistence of an object, and what we should like to call, although not quite unambiguously, the reference (Beziehung) to a content, the directedness (Richtung) toward an object (which in this context is not to be understood as something real) or the immanent-object quality (immanente Gegenständlichkeit). Each contains something as its object, though not each in the same manner. In the representation (Vorstellung) something is represented, in the judgment something is acknowledged or rejected, in desiring it is desired, etc. This intentional inexistence is peculiar alone to psychical phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything like it. And thus we can define psychical phenomena by saying that they are such phenomena as contain objects in themselves by way of intention (intentional). (1)Actually, this first characterization of the psychological phenomenon makes use of two phrases: 'intentional inexistence' and 'reference to a content.' It is the first of these phrases which has attracted most attention, and it has even given rise to the view, supported by both anti-scholastics and neo-scholastic critics, that this whole doctrine was nothing but a loan from medieval philosophy. While a quick reading of the passage may seem to confirm this view, it is nevertheless misleading. 'Intentional inexistence,' which literally implies the existence of an 'intentio' inside the intending being, as if imbedded in it, is indeed a Thomistic conception. But it is precisely this conception which Brentano himself did not share, or which in any case he abandoned, to the extent of finally even dropping the very term 'intentionality.' Thus, the second characterization of the psychic phenomenon, 'reference to an object,' is the more important and the only permanent one for Brentano; it is also the one listed exclusively in the Table of Contents, beginning with the first edition. What is more: as far as I can make out, this characterization is completely original with Brentano, except for whatever credit he himself generously extends to Aristotle for its 'first germs' in a rather minor passage of the Metaphysics (1021 a 29). It was certainly none of Brentano's doing that this new wholly unscholastic conception came to sail under the old flag of 'intentionality.' Reference to an object is thus the decisive and indispensable feature of anything that we consider psychical: No hearing without something heard, no believing without something believed, no hoping without something hoped, no striving without something striven for, no joy without something we feel joyous about, etc. Physical phenomena are characterized, by contrast, as lacking such references. It also becomes clear at this point that Brentano's psychological phenomena are always acts, taking this term in a very broad sense which comprises experiences of undergoing as well as of doing, states of consciousness as well as merely transitory processes. Here, then, Brentano for the first time uncovered a structure which was to become one of the basic patterns for all phenomenological analysis."
(1) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt I, Buch II, Kapitel I § 5 (pp. 125 f.; English translation p. 88).
From: The Phenomenological Movement. A historical introduction by Herbert Spiegelberg - Martinus Nijhoff - The Hague, 1963 (third edition). pp. 36-37.
"Of great importance is Brentano's classification of psychic phenomena. There are three classes: presentations, judgments, and emotive acts. Of the first Brentano claims that all psychic phenomena are either presentations or involve presentations (a statement accepted by Husserl in an interpretation of presentations as "objectivating acts"). Judgments are conceived by Brentano as acts of affirmation or negation; thus he rejects a propositional theory of judgment. The third class (Akte der Gemütsbewegung) contains acts of volition as well as emotions, feelings, etc. These acts are conceived in analogy to judgments; they are either positive or negative (love vs. hate) and they are correct or incorrect (love is correct if its object is intrinsically worthy of being loved). This led Brentano to a conception of ETHICS as a discipline parallel to LOGIC. His basic ideas in ethics were first published as a paper he delivered in Vienna in 1889 ( Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis; an English translation, Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, already appeared in 1902). His ethics had a strong influence on Max Scheler and on G. E. Moore (1873-1958). In his later writings Brentano became more and more interested in developing his own ontology and theory of categories. He developed a position called "reism" according to which the basic category is that of res, which comprehends both concrete things and immaterial souls. This strict objectivistic attitude was initially not influential within the phenomenological movement, but it did become important for logic and ontology in Poland. In recent years these ideas have had great influence on philosophers such as Roderick Chisholm and Barry Smith.
Of great influence on Husserl was Brentano's theory of wholes and parts, which he introduced in his "ontology," the second part of his Würzburg lectures (in the 1870s Brentano inserted a descriptive part that he called "phenomenology" between the abovementioned "transcendental philosophy" and the "ontology"). Ontology has as its basic distinction that between collectiva and divisiva, which dichotomy is in turn classified as physical, logical, and metaphysical. The influence on Husserl's formal and material ontology as developed in the third of his Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901) is obvious, and it is likely that Husserl knew about these lectures via Stumpf, to whom he refers in this context and who had an extensive copy of these lectures.
The concept of Intentionality is only a problematic link between Brentano and phenomenology. This is already indicated by the fact that Brentano later gave up the term "intentional" because he thought that his views in this connection had been misunderstood. As a matter of fact Brentano does not talk about intention or intentionality, but rather uses expressions like "intentional inexistence" or "intentionally contain" that he introduced in order to distinguish psychic phenomena from physical phenomena. An isolated quality such as red is a physical phenomenon; red as belonging to consciousness is on the other hand a psychic phenomenon.
Intentional inexistence can be regarded as a mereological concept on two different levels. On the descriptive level, a psychic phenomenon is part of a complex consciousness to which belong, for instance, inner perception, acts of judgment, and emotive acts; on the metaphysical level, which also embraces entities that are not immediately given but inferred, it is conceived as part of a soul. In contexts like "intentional inexistence," the term "intentional" does not determine the related expression "inexistence" (or "containment") but modifies it, i.e., it changes its original meaning. If these words were used in this original meaning, the following conclusions would be valid: if something exists in something else, then both things exist; if something is contained in something other than it, there is a spatial relation between them. In the modified context of "intentional inexistence" and "intentional containment," however, both conclusions are invalid. The intentional relation is thus, as Brentano explains in later writings, only "something relation-like" (etwas Relativliches). It is not, as in Husserl's intentional acts, a matter of directedness toward an object transcendent to consciousness but, in contrast, something immanent to consciousness."
Dieter Münch - "Franz Brentano" in: Lester Embree et alii (eds.) - Encyclopedia of phenomenology - Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1997, pp. 74-75.
"The standards of rigour and descriptive adequacy of Scholasticism were re-established above all by Franz Brentano and his school. Brentano, a pupil of Adolf Trendelenburg, one of the few Aristotelians in the 19th century in Germany, created a philosophical system which was a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, and the empiricism of The British School. This system was modified in different and often highly original ways by his pupils, the most important of whom were Kazimierz Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Carl Stumpf, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, and Alexius Meinong.
In contradistinction to Hegel and his fellow idealists, the Brentano School was very successful in associating its philosophical work in fruitful ways with modern developments in the sciences, above all in psychology and linguistics. Brentano’s pupils were responsible for founding not only new philosophical movements such as phenomenology, but also new programmes of scientific research such as the Gestalt theories of the Graz and Berlin Schools. Brentano’s pupils contributed in important ways to modern logic, above all through Twardowski and his students in Poland. And they contributed also to ontology, for example through Meinong and the members of The Graz School, who established the so-called theory of objects. Husserl, following in some respects in Meinong’s footsteps, founded in turn the discipline of formal ontology and was the first to analyse in formal manner the ontological concepts of dependence, part and whole. Husserl’s work in this field was then continued in philosophy above all by Adolf Reinach and Roman Ingarden, and in its application to linguistic parts and wholes by Stanislaw Lesniewski and others in Poland. Husserl’s philosophical ideas on formal and material ontology gave rise further to a new understanding of synthetic or material a priori truths. From the perspective of Husserl, Reinach, and Ingarden such truths are not, as for Kant, the products of a forming or shaping activity on the side of the subject. Rather, as for Aristotle, they represent intelligible strictures on the side of the objects of experience, structures which are not invented but discovered, and which serve, again, as a pre-empirical basis for science and philosophy."
From: Introduction - in: Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology - Edited by Barry Smith Barry and Hans Burkhardt. Munich: Philosophia Verlag 1991, pp. XXI-XXII.
"Being is a homonym. Its several senses fit into the fourfold distinction of accidental being, being in the sense of being true, being of the categories, and potential and actual being.
'Being is said in various ways', says Aristotle in the beginning of the fourth book of his Metaphysics [IV, 2, 1003a33]. He repeats this in Books VI and VII and several more times in other places. In these passages he enumerates a number of concepts, each of which, in different ways, is called a being. In Met. IV. 2. 1003b6 he says 'one thing is said to be because it is substance, another because it is an attribute of substance, still another because it is a process toward substance, or corruption of substance, or privation of substantial forms or quality of substance, or because it produces or generates substance or that which is predicated of substance, or because it is a negation of such a thing or of substance itself. For this reason we also say that non-being is nonbeing." The various sorts of being which are here enumerated can be reduced to four kinds: (1) Being which has no existence whatever outside the understanding (privation, negation); (2) The being of movement and of generation and corruption (process toward substance, destruction); for though these are outside the mind, they do not have complete and perfect existence (cf. Physics III 1. 201a9); (3) Being which has complete but dependent existence (affections of substance, qualities, things productive and generative) (4) The being of the substances (ousia)." (p. 3).
"Thesis I: The categories are not merely a framework for concepts, but they are themselves real concepts, extramental independent being.
This is Aristotle's opinion which he states clearly and repeatedly, so much so that, as I said, I cannot believe that there are more than verbal differences between his interpreters. If, to begin with, there is no doubt that being itself, of which the metaphysician must treat, is a concept, indeed a real concept, since what merely exists objectively in the mind was previously set aside, there can also be no doubt with respect to the categories." (p. 57)
"Thesis II: The categories are several senses of being which is asserted of the analogically, indeed in a twofold manner, i.e. as analogy of proportionality, and as analogy to the same terminus.
This sentence contains a further confirmation of the preceding one. It contains three assertions: (1) that being which is divided according the schema of the categories is divided not like a univocal concept, i.e., as a genus into species, but rather in the manner of a homonym which is differentiated according to its various senses; (2) that the use of 'being' for the different categories, even though an a homonym, is not a mere accidental likeness of names,; rather, that there is among them a unity of analogy; and, finally, (3) that the analogy among them is a twofold one, namely, not only an analogy of proportionality, but also an analogy to the same terminus. We hope to secure this result fully by establishing it, point by point, from the various utterances of our philosopher." (pp. 58-59).
"Thesis III. The categories are the highest univocal general concepts, the highest genera of being.
In the previous section we have considered the categories in relation to being, which is superordinate to them and designates them jointly, though it is not, properly speaking, common to them. Their unity was a unity of analogy; nothing applied to them in one and the same way (Met. VII 4 1030a32), i.e., univocally. It has already been shown that there is no higher univocal concept. We now turn to a consideration of the relation between the categories and the things subordinate to them, and here we find, by contrast, that all things belonging to the same category are things univocally named. The categories are general concepts in the proper sense, and genera of things." (p. 66).
"These XIV. There is a harmony between the categories of Aristotle and the grammatical differences of noun and adjective, verb and adverb.
When Trendelenburg (1) advanced his now famous hypothesis about the grammatical origin of Aristotle's categories he wanted to find, to begin with, something which could have guided Aristotle in the determination of the highest genera. He was concerned with rejecting the objection of Kant and Hegel that Aristotle haphazardly raked together a round number of general concepts. We hope to have met this objection in a different way.
It must be admitted that a procedure which lacks an ontological principle and thus has to rely on mere agreement with grammatical relations as a guarantee for the validity of this important division cannot escape being reproached for its superficiality.
Still it is a phenomenon welcome to sound philosophy to find itself in agreement with common sense and with the general consciousness which is exhibited particularly also in language. Thus it is a recommendation for Aristotle's categories that there is a considerable kinship between his categories and certain linguistic forms. It seems to me that Trendelenburg has shown that this is undeniable, no matter how many objections have been raised. He has also shown that Aristotle was well aware of this agreement with grammar. Here as everywhere he knew how to make use of the speculations of earlier thinkers and the speculative content of common opinions. He noticed, above all, that if one thing is essentially predicated of another so that name and concept of the predicate applies to it, the this occurs in a grammatically different form than if the predicate merely give its name to the subject without being of the essence of the subject." (pp. 123-124).
(1) Adolf Trendelenburg - Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (History of the theory of Categories) - Berlin, 1846 [Note added]
"Thesis XV. The preceding investigation concerning the principle and meaning of the categories resolves objection raised from various quarters against the division of the categories.
Aristotle's division of categories has withstood the passage of time in an admirable way. If one follows the history of the doctrine of categories he can see that even its opponents pay unconscious tribute to it, an one is often inclined to smile on discovering that those who consider themselves its decided opponents are essentially guided by it.
The present era no longer has an Aristotelian doctrine of categories. When we now speak of categories we do not think of the what, how, how much, in relation to what. But none of the more recent systems has been able to establish a lasting reputation. More recent theories which investigate categories non longer pursue the same goal as Aristotle, and one cannot possibly claim that they have put anything into the place of the old categories.
The question if now whether one can suppose that something with has lived so long can lack all vitality, or whether it is rather the case that it meet its purpose, the thru purpose of the table of categories. We hardly need to say that our opinion inclines toward a favourable judgment, and in out investigation we have generally attempted to let the doctrine of categories develop with a kind of internal necessity -- presupposing the correctness of other Aristotelian doctrines." (p. 130).
"This now complete the domain of our inquiry, Step by step we have ascended from what has been called being in a lesser sense to proper being. Of the four senses into which being is initially divided, being in figures of the categories was the most distinguished. The course of this chapter has shown that the categories bear the name of 'being' all with respect to one being, namely, with respect to their being of the first category.
It would be more proper to say of every other category that it is of a being than it is a being. Hence it is substance which has being in the preeminent sense, i.e. which is not only something, but simply is. There are many sense in which something ca be first, but substance is among all being the first in every sense, in concept, in cognition, as well as in time. Its being in the terminus to which all stand in analogy, just as health is the terminus with respect to which everything that is healthful is called healthful, either because it has it, or because it bring about it, or shows it, etc. If now metaphysics is the science of being as such, the it is clear that its main objects is substance. For in all cases of such analogies science treats mainly of the first, upon which the others depend, and form which they receive their name. Hence the first philosopher must research the principles and grounds of substance. His primary, most distinguished, and in a sense only, task is to consider what it is." (p. 148).
From: Franz Brentano - On the several senses of Being in Aristotle - Berkeley: University of California Press 1975 (Greek words and notes omitted).
See the article "Franz Brentano", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), for a first approach to Brentano's work.
Last modified: Monday, February 08, 2010