The project investigates Brentano’s method of one-step induction in his descriptive psychology with respect to its role for Husserl’s establishing of phenomenology in Logical Investigations. In order to do this, it also approaches the intricate transformations that took place in Brentano’s thinking in his Viennese period between 1874 and 1895. The main research hypothesis is that Brentano shifts from his early explicative method of empirical psychology (1874) similar to the inductive method of natural sciences, reaching only empirical generalizations to a method able to provide apodictic knowledge necessary for the founding of normative sciences such as ethics, aesthetics, or logic, without sacrificing the only source of knowledge Brentano accepts, namely intuitive experience. Brentano’s descriptive methodology is however problematic, and much needed clarifications can be gained by analyzing how Husserl appropriated and further developed it into his method of pure phenomenological description.

A full-length study is available here.