Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist, born in Marienberg am Rhein in 1838 and died in Zürich in 1917. A Catholic priest at first, he left the priesthood in 1873 over the dogma of papal infallibility and taught as a professor at Würzburg and then at the University of Vienna from 1874 to 1895. His 1874 book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint reintroduced the scholastic idea of intentionality into modern philosophy. His teaching gathered a group of students known as the School of Brentano, among them Carl Stumpf, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud and Christian von Ehrenfels. His focus on conscious intentionality, sometimes called act psychology, was inherited by Stumpf's Berlin School of experimental psychology and Meinong's Graz School.