My contribution on “Philosophy as Science as Core Feature of the School of Brentano: Comparing Brentano and Paulsen” is now available in Open Access. In the contribution I provide two different perspectives on the issue of the unity and identity of the School of Brentano in relation to Brentano’s well-known thesis that “the true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences”.

The first perspective uses a narrow focus on the School itself. Instead of starting “top down” from the abstract and general question of principle whether the students of Brentano formed a school and whether this group had the required degree of unity and coherence, I propose to begin from the “bottom up”: can we find at least one thing they all agreed on and continued to agree on? If so, this might constitute a crystallization point around which more moments of unity can accrete, a core belief of the group such that we might call it a core tenet of a school. I propose that this can be found in their philosophy of mathematics and can be tied to several other core issues in the School, including symbolic intentionality as well as their philosophy of science and epistemology. In this way, I hope to show their unity as a school by focusing on a very specific and particular issue.

The other perspective I would like to offer is achieved by broadening the focus instead. It is instructive to compare Brentano’s specific interpretation of the idea (or ideal) of “philosophy as science” with others who formulated this idea in a similar, but different way. A promising target for this comparison is Friedrich Paulsen, who, like Brentano, also studied under Trendelenburg and explicitly advocated the idea of philosophy as science in his influential Introduction to Philosophy. Paulsen moreover was a colleague of Stumpf in Berlin and Husserl’s first teacher in philosophy.

The members of the School of Brentano were quite aware of the fact that the status of “philosophy as science” was more than simply a rallying cry or a slogan launched by Brentano and endorsed uncritically by his students, but a shared issue that needed to be worked on. This means refining it together as well as distinguishing it from other approaches. It is not just the case that the very idea of “philosophy as science,” and specifically the idea that “philosophy uses the same method as the natural sciences,” distinguishes the School of Brentano toto coelo from German Idealism, but also, more subtly, the specific interpretation and how it was worked out in detail by Brentano’s students, distinguishes their shared position from other conceptions of “philosophy as science”, such as Paulsen’s.