Bolzano, Mach and Brentano: The Austro-German Contribution to Contemporary Philosophy in five turning points

Bolzano, Mach and Brentano: The Austro-German Contribution to Contemporary Philosophy in five turning points

Guillaume Fréchette

Brentano’s late reism is often interpreted as a kind of nominalism, according to which all categories of entities boil down to the category of real things: the only things that exist are real things. This interpretation is reinforced by Brentano’s own linguistic remarks about general terms and expressions seemingly referring to entities: names for irreal entities, such as “past King” or “the being P of S” only seemingly refer: they are co-signifying, or syncategorematic expressions.

If Brentano’s late reism is a turn to a form of nominalism, does it mean that this turn is also a turn to the ontological virtues of nominalism, including the rejection of universals? Many seem to think so and to understand reism as a metaphilosophical stance on what is the best way to conduct ontology. From this perspective, many holds that Brentano’s reism is a turn to ontological parsimony, to the Franciscan barber’s adage: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

In this paper, I reject this understanding of Brentano’s reism. After discussing three major problems with this view, I suggest that Brentano’s reism is only a nominalism about abstract objects belonging to the category of irreal and non- existent, such as concepts (in the sense of Bolzano’s Vorstellungen an sich), propositions (such as Bolzano’s Sätze an sich), states of affairs, objectives, Gestalten, and the like. Such entities should be eliminated, in Brentano’s view, because their postulation leads to absurdities, and not so much as a matter of ontological parsimony. Reism is not a nominalism about universals: postulating universals, in his view, doesn’t lead to absurdities.