Chapter Four Anton Marty On Being and Truth

Being, for Aristotle, is an analogous term. It is said in many ways. We can distinguish above all between being in the sense of the categories and being in the sense of being true, a distinction which served as the basis of the early Brentanian bicategorial ontology of things or realia on the one hand, and entia rationis or irrealia on the other. While Brentano abandoned an ontology of this sort, the idea was defended and elaborated by Anton Marty, who belonged to the very first generation of Brentano’s students, and it is Marty’s work which will be the subject of our present chapter. Entia realia are for example a soul and its real constituents or ‘divisives’: (the various mental acts of presentation, judgment, love and hate). Entia rationis are for example a seen colour, a heard sound, but also entities such as the existence of A and the non-existence of B. As we saw in Chapter Two, Brentano embraced in his early writings the doctrine that these and other objects of thought are not merely intentional but in fact immanent in consciousness, after the fashion of Aristotle’s conception of the process of cognition as an interiorization of the form of the object cognized. The object of thought is something non-real which dwells in (innewohnt) a real substance (a thinker). Each object of thought is therefore sharply to be distinguished from any corresponding actual object (if there is one).