BRENTANO ON PHILOSOPHY AS A SCIENCE

The Introduction to Brentano's posthumous Geschichte der Philosophie der Neuzeit (GPhN), edited by Dr. Klaus Hedwig, is compiled primarily from the manuscripts H 45 and H 47 (which date from 1870 and before 1870, respectively). Its title, "On the Concept of the History of Philosophy" (GPhN, pp. 1-12), indicates the path Brentano chose to take here in exploring the question of what philosophy actually is. In pursuing this question, Brentano variously (in the separate manuscripts and their separate parts) arrives at the definition of philosophy as a science. In this paper, I reconstruct Brentano's apparent train of thought as it is to be found in the text and notes provided by Hedwig in the Foreword, Introduction, and Editor's Notes to GPhN. I conclude that if we are to understand fully what Brentano meant by philosophy as a science, then we must repair to Aristotle's Physics, as it provides the model here. Among other things, this explains why Brentano considered the teleological proof of God's existence, among other empirical proofs, to be certain and irrefutable. Aristotle's inclusion of the question of God, the unmoved mover, in his book on nature (phusis), provided inspiration for Brentano as well as it did for his Scholastic forebears. Philosophy is a science in this inclusive sense, for Brentano, and at the same time his claim that philosophy is a science should be understood as a normative assertion about the rigorous method that is appropriate to philosophy.