Abstract

This chapter discusses Franz Brentano's influence on the Moravian-born philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology and mentor of Martin Heidegger, among other notable twentieth-century philosophers. Husserl arrived in Vienna having completed his military service there and went on to spend two years there, attending Brentano's lectures in particular. Brentano had distinguished generally between what he termed "genuine" or "authentic" presentations, where the object is directly given; and nongenuine, "inauthentic", or "symbolic" presentations, where the object is referred to in some kind of indirect, empty, or symbolic manner. Ten years after the Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl published his Logical Investigations, the first volume of which, entitled Prolegomena to a Pure Logic, was devoted to an extensive refutation of psychologism—the view that logical concepts and operations can be explained fully in terms of psychological concepts and operations. Husserl felt that Brentano remained immersed in a naturalistic, empirical psychology and could not make the breakthrough to phenomenological realm of pure essences.