Dermot Moran clarifying Brentano's Thesis

Dermot Moran's "Brentano's Thesis" (his inaugural address at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association) is really insightful and enlightening. For decades now, Brento's thesis has become a cliche in the intentionality and consciousness literature. Most people take Brentano to have highlighted intentionality as a feature of the mental which resists a physicalistic or materialistic account. Some contemporaries have misunderstood Brentano's "intentional inexistence" as meaning an intentionality the object of which is absent or non-existent. Moran tries to shed light on all these misunderstandings surrounding the historical Brentano.


1. Brentano didn't raise intentionality as a feature which marks the mental off the physical. In fact, Brentano has a phenomenological interpretation of the physical based on our perceptual phenomenology. (note that Brentano never used the term "intentionality"; he just used the term "intentional inexitence".)

2. Intentional inexistence means an inner existence which is directed towards contents. Inexistence doesn't mean non-existence; it just means inner existence. Twardowski has interpreted the intentional inexistence as phenomenal existence.

3. The materialism or reductionism debate is not a concern of Brentano's method of phenomenology or "descriptive psychology". So he wouldn't have any idea about how intentionality could be an argument against materialism.