Franz Brentano and William James

This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.

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Les données immédiates de la conscience. Neutralité métaphysique et psychologie descriptive chez James et Husserl

Philosophiques ◽

10.7202/000432ar ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 35 (2) ◽

pp. 317-344

Author(s):

Bruno Leclercq

Keyword(s):

William James ◽

Edmund Husserl ◽

Franz Brentano

Résumé L’intérêt durable porté par Edmund Husserl aux travaux de William James en dépit de la divergence de leurs projets philosophiques s’explique sans doute par deux traits saillants de la psychologie de James qui l’inscrivent dans le prolongement de celle de Franz Brentano et lui confèrent même une certaine supériorité par rapport à cette dernière. Ces deux traits sont d’une part la capacité de James à articuler de manière particulièrement convaincante les analyses de psychologie descriptive aux explications en termes neurophysiologiques et d’autre part sa capacité à penser le caractère dynamique du flux de conscience et la genèse en lui de la structure intentionnelle. Bien plus, loin de la condamner au psychologisme, ces deux traits de la pensée de James s’inscrivent sur fond d’une critique très sévère de la « psychologist’s fallacy » commise notamment dans l’école associationniste, critique qui marqua profondément Husserl.

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Intentionality and the stream of thought: Brentano and James

Theoria Beograd ◽

10.2298/theo0803015a ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 15-27

Author(s):

Miroslava Andjelkovic

Keyword(s):

Philosophy Of Mind ◽

William James ◽

Edmund Husserl ◽

Franz Brentano ◽

Relationship Of ◽

Physical Phenomena ◽

The Relationship ◽

Philosophical Importance

Philosophers have not done much research on the connection between philosophical and psychological views of Franz Brentano and William James. This connection is of particular historical interest because their views influenced Edmund Husserl, but it also bears philosophical importance as one can show why in James' philosophy of mind there is no correlate to Brentano's notion of intentionality which designates the relationship between mental and physical phenomena. Given this, intentionality, if there is room for it in James' psychology, would be the relation which holds between the correlates of these phenomena in his analysis of consciousness. I am trying to show that there is such a correlation between mental phenomena and James' notion of transitive segments, as well as between physical phenomena and James' notion of substantive segments of consciousness. The question is whether the segments of consciousness stand in the relationship of intentionality and I argue that this is not the case.

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Contexts (I)

Henry James and the Art of Impressions ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198853510.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 59-94

Author(s):

John Scholar

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Intellectual History ◽

David Hume ◽

John Locke ◽

William James ◽

History Of ◽

Franz Brentano ◽

The Subject ◽

The Way

Chapter 2 begins the book’s intellectual history of the impression from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (which continues in Chapter 3). These contexts come from two movements, empiricism and aestheticism. Chapter 2 explores empiricist contexts, arguing that James’s impression owes much to empiricist philosophy (John Locke, David Hume), and nineteenth-century empiricist psychology (James Mill, J. S. Mill, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, William James). By tracking the word ‘impression’, we can see that Locke and Hume’s stress on first-hand observation, and on thought as a kind of perception, are contexts for James’s conception of the imaginative but observant novelist, for the epistemological demands he makes on his readers, and for the way he represents his characters’ consciousnesses, especially in recognition scenes. Nineteenth-century empiricists’ divergence as to the agency of the subject in consciousness is reflected in James’s characters whose impressions by turns assault them from the exterior, or are partly fictions of their own making.

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A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x18000626 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Ana Gantman ◽

Robin Gomila ◽

Joel E. Martinez ◽

J. Nathan Matias ◽

Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽

...

Keyword(s):

William James ◽

Mental Processes ◽

Psychological Science ◽

Behavioral Measurement ◽

The World ◽

Pragmatist Philosophy

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

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