RESUMO 04 | PALESTRA INTERNACIONAL

Twardowski on Content and Object

LECLERC, André | UnB/CNPq, Canadá

As is well known, Brentano’s notion of intentional in-existence was the key notion to distinguish psychological phenomena from physical ones. But it was also the source of some lasting confusions. Treated as an ontological thesis, intentional in-existence confers ontological status to mythical beings like winged horses or even to impossible beings like square circles and colourful logarithms. Brentano reacted to that ontological inflation with his reism in 1905. But the first to see how easy it was to avoid these confusions was Kazimierz Twardowski, with his simple and convincing distinction between the content and the object of representations. After exposing the problem, we shall present Twardowski’s distinction and show how it resolves the problem.