Franz Brentano and His Philosophical Nachlass

Franz Brentano (18381917) is widely regarded as one of the most influental philosophers of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Nonetheless philosophical historiography has not yet passed a definite judgement concerning the significance of his achievements. The main reason for this situation is that access to his works is insufficient to the present day. This insufficient access is in turn a consequence of the fact that the larger part of his writings exists only in handwritten form: after his magnum opus Psycholgy from an empirical standpoint (which itself remained unfinished) Brentano did not publish any comprehensive works. The first part of the current study aims at identifying some of the causes of his reluctant willingsness to publish his thoughts and focuses on the one hand upon the conflictual biographical background and Brentanos complex personality, on the other hand upon theoretical problems in conceiving a psychology as a unified science which entail the abandonment of his principal work. The second part of the current text tries to sketch the checkered history of Brentanos philosophical Nachlass which has also considerably hampered the adoption of his philosophical theories. The study presented herewith contains the most comprehensive biography of Brentano written so far and benefits to a great extent from the analysis of unpublished or newly discovered source materials. Also the history of the Nachlass itself is reproduced with great detail from Brentanos death until today revealing numerous new aspects (e. g. many facts of the exile of Brentanos unpublished papers in Great Britain are presented here for the first time). The theoretical part of the study is focused on the question why Brentano did not finish the second volume of his principal work a systematic question which is of eminent importance for understanding his philosophical work as a whole and which was widely neglected in the secondary literature so far.