The Soul and Its Parts II: Varieties of Inexistence

Introduction A Brentanian might criticize contemporary philosophy of mind on at least the following counts: i. its taxonomy of types of mental act and state is too narrow (thus its repertoire consists, on many standard accounts, in little more than ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’); ii. its treatment of mental acts and states is too slavishly oriented around linguistic factors (thus for example it is standardly suggested that the philosophy of mind is most properly concerned with so-called ‘propositional attitudes’); iii. its treatment of the temporal structures of mental acts and states is overly crude (thus in many standard accounts punctual and episodic acts are not distinguished from enduring states and dispositions); iv. it presupposes an over-crude theory of the internal structures of mental acts and states and of the corresponding types of parts and unity. It is with this latter that we shall be principally concerned in what follows, and more precisely with Brentano’s own account of the part-whole structures obtaining in the mental sphere. We shall find, however, that this account will have implications also for our understanding of the other factors mentioned. A study of the internal structures of mental acts and states will in addition be of some general formal-ontological interest in that it will reveal to us new and subtle possibilities for mereological investigation. It will further be of metaphysical interest, in reflection of the fact that the objects of experience are themselves parts of mind, on Brentano’s view, so that there is a sense in which for him (as e.g. for Leibniz) ontology is a proper part of rational or descriptive psychology.