A life, a novel

pp. 5-41

in: Liliana Albertazzi, Immanent realism, Berlin, Springer, 2006

Abstract

The figure of Franz Brentano appears in an oddly shifting light when one reads university chronicles and newspaper articles of his time, family accounts, and the memoirs of his pupils. For his detractors he was an ecclesiastic and a relic from the Middle Ages; for the Catholic Church a rebellious heterodox in odour of Ultramontanism. His most implacable enemies, Husserl tells us, even went so far as to call him, variously, a Jesuit in disguise, a prattler, a Pharisee, a sophist, and a scholastic.