The Substance of Brentano’s Ontology

1. Substances and Accidents The literature on Brentano of recent times has manifested an unmistakeably deflationary tendency, often presenting Brentano as little more than a forerunner of analytic philosophy, and rarely taking account of more than those few passages in which Brentano talks about something called 'intentionality'. 1 The present paper is an attempt to redress this balance. It seeks to demonstrate that, for all his analytic acumen, Brentano is to be classified not with the dry logic-and-language-choppers of modern times, but rather with the great metaphysical visionaries of the past, from Leibniz and Descartes to Spinoza and Lord Kelvin. Only in these terms, it may be argued, is it possible to explain the tremendous influence exerted by Brentano on so many of his pupils and disciples. The paper is a study of Brentano's ontology, and more specifically of his theory of substance and accident, particularly as put forward toward the end of his life in the materials collected together as the Kategorienlehre. The question as to the nature of substance has notoriously been answered in different ways at different times in the history of philosophy. Kant, for example, conceived substance (or the 'schema' of substance) as that which remains identical through change. Locke conceived it as a 'supposed I-know-not-what', which is inferred as lying behind the phenomena and as linking them together. 2 Hobbes conceived it as that which exists 'without the help of sense', i.e. independently of whether we conceive it or have an idea of it, maintaining that only that which is corporeal can meet this requirement. 3 For Leibniz, on the other hand, a substance is just a monad, i.e. it is simple (has no parts), ingenerable and incorruptible, and it is always mental. All of these accounts, and all their many variants, are rejected by Brentano as incompatible with the original Aristotelian theory of substance. Indeed, as Brentano conceives things, they avoid the very problems which Aristotle was struggling with