Why Brentano is Important

If Edmund Husserl is the father of phenomenology, Franz Brentano is its grandfather: his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, along with his lectures at the University of Vienna were powerful influences on the young Husserl who, though a Ph.D. in mathematics (under Weierstrass on the calculus of variations) abandoned mathematics for philosophy. (2) Brentano's dissertation under Trendelenburg, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, was a powerful impetus to Heidegger's ruminations on Being. (3) Brentano, as Gustav Bergmann points out, was "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, p. 234) Brentano, then, can be said to stand at the source of both the phenomenological and the analytic streams of thought as they developed in the 20th century.