The Theory of Categories

ISBN-13: 9789024723027 / Angielski / Twarda / 1981 / 276 str.

Franz Clemens Brentano; F. C. Brentano; Roderick M. Chisholm

Opis

This book contains the definitive statement of Franz Brentano's views on meta- physics. It is made up of essays which were dictated by Brentano during the last ten years of his life, between 1907 and 1917. These dictations were assembled and edited by Alfred Kastil and first published by the Felix Meiner Verlag in 1933 under the title Kategorienlehre. Kastil added copious notes to Brentano's text. These notes have been included, with some slight omissions, in the present edition; the bibliographical references have been brought up to date. Brentano's approach to philosophy is unfamiliar to many contemporay readers. I shall discuss below certain fundamental points which such readers are likely to find the most difficult. I believe that once these points are properly understood, then what Brentano has to say will be seen to be of first importance to philosophy. THE PRIMACY OF THE INTENTIONAL To understand Brentano's theory of being, one must realize that he appeals to what he calls inner perception for his paradigmatic uses of the word "is." For inner perception, according to Brentano, is the source of our knowledge of the nature of being, just as it is the source of our knowledge of the nature of truth and of the nature of good and evil. And what can be said about the being of things that are not apprehended in inner perception can be understood only by analogy with what we are able to say about ourselves as thinking subjects.

Spis treści

to the Theory of Categories.- One The Strict and the Extended Senses of Being.- I. The Ambiguity of “IS” and the Unity of the Concept of Being.- A. Being in the strict sense and in the extended sense.- B. Beings in the strict sense and in the extended sense.- C. General objects as beings in the extended sense.- D. Universals and their specifications.- E. The bizarre distinction between being and existence.- II. Real and Fictive Parts of Being.- A. Universal, genus, species and individual.- B. Ways of combining objects of thought.- C. Unity, things and parts of things.- D. Fictive parts of things.- E. The part-whole relation with reference to collectives, continua, and accidents.- III. Being and Intensity.- A. Incomplete entelechy and intensity.- I. Aristotle’s doctrine of incomplete entelechy.- II. The traditional conception of intensity and the Aristotelian definition of motion.- III. Critique of the traditional doctrine of intensity.- IV. The connection between the theory of intensity and the theory of multiple quality.- B. Intensity of mass, elasticity and impenetrability.- C. Intensity of effect.- D. Kant’s doctrine of intensity.- Two Preliminary Studies for the Theory of Categories.- I. Aristotle’s Theory of Categories: Interpretation and Critique.- A. The fundamental ideas and the fundamental errors.- B. The meaning of the Aristotelian theory of categories: substance as principle of individuation.- C. Toward a reform of the Aristotelian theory of categories.- II. Substance.- A. Philosophical conceptions of substance.- B. Derivation of the concept of substance.- C. Substance and accident.- D. Substance, self, and self-awareness.- III. Relations.- A. On that which is relative to something.- B. Sameness and difference and how we apprehend them.- C. Sameness, similarity, and analogy.- D. On the concept of efficient cause.- E. The temporal relation between cause and effect.- F. The temporal relation in causation and in self-preservation.- Three The Final Three Drafts of the Theory of Categories.- I. The First Draft of the Theory of Categories.- A. The ambiguity and unclarity of words and syntactic structures.- B. The types of predication.- I. Spurious predications.- II. Genuine predications and ultimate subjects.- III. Predications and pluralities.- C. The passive affections.- D. Comparison with the Aristotelian theory of categories.- E. The problem of the criteria for distinguishing categories.- F. The copula in genuine predications.- G. Addendum: the compatibility of accidents within the same category.- II. The Second Draft of the Theory of Categories.- A. The unreliability of grammar as a guide to descriptive psychology.- B. Genuine and spurious predications.- C. Synopsis and supplement.- D. Excursus on the so-called abstracta.- III. The Third Draft of the Theory of Categories.- IV. Appendix: The Nature of the Physical World in the Light of the Theory of Categories.- Editorial notes by Alfred Kastil.- Index to Brentano’s text.

O autorze

Franz Brentano (1838-1917) verband die Philosophie eng mit der Psychologie, die für ihn die Grundwissenschaft schlechthin war. Er war Begründer der Aktpsychologie, eine idealistische Strömung philosophisch-psychologischen Denkens, die vor allem an Traditionen der mittelalterlichen Scholastik anknüpft. Brentano lehrte nach seiner Habilitation 1866 erst in Würzburg, später in Wien Philosophie. Zu seinen Schülern zählten Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Sigmund Freud und Rudolf Steiner. Seine Lehre beeinflusste maßgeblich die Grazer Schule und die Phänomenologie.