Status Updates From Austrian Philosophy: The Le...

...profit, the division of labour, money, and so on...Menger, in fact, seeks to develop a categorical ontology of economic reality in just the sense in which Brentano sought a categorical ontology of psychological reality.’

I never would have thought to find a discussion of economics interesting!

‘Menger quite clearly believes that there are a priori categories (‘essences’ or ‘natures’) existing autonomously in reality and that a priori propositions reflect structures or connections among such essences. Thus he insists that economists study not concepts or other creatures of the mind, but rather the qualitative essences or natures of and the relations between such categories as value, rent,...

‘Both Mach and Brentano were ‘empiricists’, but there is a striking difference between the phenomenalist empiricism of Mach and what we might call the qualitative and structuralist empiricism of Brentano and his circle.’

‘The most philosophically sophisticated treatment of the Gestalt character of actions is...to be found in the writings of Merleau-Ponty (for example, Phenomenology of Perception, especially Part 1, chapter 3)’

‘For Brentano it is as if the world of things is continuously annihilated and recreated anew with each successive passing instant...Strictly speaking there are no ‘instants of time’ in Brentano’s ontology, not even the present instant. Rather, there are only things existing now or presently (instantaneously) existing things.’

‘The influence of Brentanism on Polish analytic philosophers such as Kotarbiński and Leśniewski has been largely overlooked.’

...They differ, rather, in other ways, which will be our business to describe.’

...oops, ignore the “pfft”...sorta typo, was from a previous comment note...

‘The terminology of genuine and phantasy feelings (derived from Meinong’s talk of Ernstgefühle and Scheingefühle) should not be taken to imply that the latter are in some sense unreal...They are simply conscious processes whose bases lacks appropriate moments of conviction or belief. Hence they exist in no less real a sense than do their serious counterparts. They differ, rather,...

pfft...

‘Relations must be objective, then [according to Anton Marty], for otherwise science would be impossible.’

pfft...

‘Martian irrealia, accordingly, have something in common with the ‘Cambridge changes’ of the analytic tradition. More precisely, they are analogous to what we might call ‘Cambridge states’ such as being a father, being unheard of in Finland, being persona grata in South Africa, and the like.’

‘Newton, we might say, sees time and space as mutually separable, Einstein sees time and space as mutually dependent. Brentano, in contrast, sees space as one-sidedly dependent on (inseparably from) time. Time can exist without space, but not vice versa.’

‘It is crucial to the Brentanian theory that there be no extra entity which would make up the difference between substance and accident...An accident is a thing, no less than its substance. There are no jumps and runs, only jumpers and runners; no thoughts and feelings, but only thinkers and feelers. No qualities and quantities, but only qualified, quantified things.’

...The self might even be a special bodily organ, and the stuff of this organ be continuously renewed, so that the unity of consciousness would be, as Brentano says, “like that of a river.”’

‘Indeed, because in relation to any putative diachronic identity of or involving unified groups, evidence is unavailable. Brentano at the time of his Psychology sees it as “an open question whether the perseverance of the ego is the survival of one and the same unitary thing or the succession of different things, of which the one would connect itself to the other and as it were take its place.”...

‘Brentano developed a view of science and knowledge which incorporates aspects of both Cartesianism and British empiricist philosophizing. The overarching context of all Brentano’s writings is, however, the psychology of Aristotle, together with the ontology of material and immaterial substance that goes together therewith.’