Having survived the first week of the academic year, with all its openings and introductions, it is time to look back and assess the past year and outline some plans for the coming one.

In my VENI project proposal, I stated that I would start out in the first year by reconstructing Brentano’s ideal of philosophy as science. Already at the beginning of the year, in November 2012, I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the conference “The Making of the Humanities III” in Rome that discussed precisely “Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science”, an elaborated version of which will be forthcoming soon in the volume The Making of the Modern Humanities. While my account in this paper was aimed at a broader public in the humanities, I also prepared a more specialized article on “Brentano’s Science of Consciousness” for consideration in a volume on Brentano et le programme d’une philosophie scientifique, dealing more in depth and detail with Brentano’s main philosophical and psychological method. In November 2013 I will again have the opportunity to give a presentation about my project at the first annual conference of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy. While my 2012 presentation was more programmatic in character, now I can present some more concrete results of my research.

As projected in my proposal, the work I did for these articles forms the backbone for subsequent work on Brentano’s students. Although I originally planned to proceed mostly chronologically and work on Meinong, Stumpf, and Marty in the second year, due to various circumstances I find myself working mostly on Ehrenfels at the moment. The entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (in collaboration with Robin Rollinger) is nearly done and I am also planing on writing an article on Ehrenfels’ (unpublished) dissertation Grössenrelationen und Zahlen.

I also am planning to go abroad for (archival) research and I have several other publications and projects in the pipeline, about which I hope to be able to report more concretely soon. I still have a few months left to get everything I mentioned in my Christmas post done!