Franz Brentano’s empirical and descriptive psychology

Franz Brentano was a leading philosopher and psychologist of the late nineteenth century. His epoch-making Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) promoted a new form of scientific psychology capable of refounding philosophy after the downfall of German idealism. This project was utterly original, since it relied on innovative recovery of the psychology of Aristotle, which Brentano revitalized by drawing upon the methodological contributions of modern science. Brentano’s empirical psychology, in fact, constitutes an act psychology since it offers an Aristotelian conception of mental phenomena as energeia—mental activity deriving from the exercise of an initially only dispositional capacity. This activity is intentional, since it always turns first toward an object, i.e., something other than itself, and secondarily turns pre-reflectively toward itself; this is how we become aware of our own mental phenomena. In the 1880s and 1890s, Brentano would develop ever-sharper distinctions between genetic and descriptive psychology. He defined the former as studying the “genesis” and diachronic, causal unfolding of mental events; it was thus a natural science entailing an inductive-experimental method and arriving at empirical, probabilistic laws. He instead understood descriptive psychology as analyzing states of consciousness from a purely phenomenological, first-person point of view; he therefore defined it as identifying the internal structure and classes of mental acts through inner perception and the outlining of a sort of “map of consciousness.”