Brentano-School

Franz Brentano Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was an Austrian-German philosopher whose work marks one of the quiet turning points of modern philosophy. Born at Marienberg am Rhein into a Catholic family of Italian origin — he was a great-nephew of the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano — he took his doctorate at Tübingen in 1862 with the thesis Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (“On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle”), a study that the young Martin Heidegger read in his adolescence and that would shape an entire twentieth-century lineage of return to Aristotle. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, he completed his Habilitation at Würzburg in 1866 and resigned from the priesthood in 1873 amid the crisis opened by the dogma of papal infallibility (Vatican I, 1870). In Vienna, where he taught from 1874 to 1895, he gathered a remarkable constellation of pupils — Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, Stumpf, Ehrenfels, Marty — out of whom phenomenology, object theory, and the Lvov-Warsaw School would emerge. He lost his chair in 1880 because he married (Austrian law treated former priests as still bound by their vow of celibacy) and was reduced to Privatdozent. He retired in 1895 and lived first in Florence and then in Zurich, where he died, blind, in 1917. ...