Franz Brentano

For a long time, the philosophical significance of Franz Brentano has been reduced to being the most important teacher of Edmund Husserl. However, since Roderick Chisholm’s pioneering work (cf. e.g. Chisholm 1982, Chisholm 1986) the situation has changed. Nowadays the importance of Brentano’s work is generally appreciated and there is a growing community of scholars involved in Brentano research (cf. e.g. papers collected in Kriegel 2017). Brentano’s contributions are numerous. Beside inspiring such important movements as Husserlian phenomenology, Meinongian theory of objects, and Polish analytic philosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw school, Brentano developed many interesting philosophical ideas. The importance of his re-discovery of intentionality is well appreciated, but his analyses of epistemic and ethical concepts are just as interesting and his late reistic ontology is still highly attractive for those "who have a taste for desert landscapes" (Quine 1951)