"History of Logic" Seminar Series - Talk: M. Cosci, "Franz Brentano’s Urteilstheorie from Intentionality to Reism" (06.02.2025)

[antpic...@gmail.com]

Dear all,

this is to announce the fourth session of our History of Logic seminar series. The session will be held on Thursday, February 6, from 3 pm to 5 pm (CET).

This time, the session will be held in hybrid form. We will meet in person at the Aliotta Lecture Hall of the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples Federico II (Maps). The meeting will be broadcast via Zoom. To have the Zoom link, please write to historyofl...@gmail.com to be subscribed to the mailing list.

On this occasion, we will host a talk by Matteo Cosci, Associate Professor of History of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, and the history of Aristotelianism. In addition to several contributions on these topics, he has co-edited The Aftermath of Syllogism (London 2018) and, more recently, Aristotle's Syllogism and the Creation of Modern Logic (Bloomsbury 2023). These latter works have stimulated a reconsideration of the history of logic from a longue durée perspective, including the Aristotelianism of Franz Brentano.

His talk is titled Franz Brentano’s Urteilstheorie from Intentionality to Reism. Here is a short abstract:

Among the many philosophical endeavours of Franz Brentano (1838-1917) one should not overlook his original contribution in logic. In the first edition of his main work, namely the Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874) he announced a forthcoming “complete collapse and, at the same time, a reconstruction of elementary logic”. Such a bold statement was meant to introduce a radical reform, if not a revolution, not only of traditional scholastic logic, but for the whole subject as such. Brentano was persuaded that he could deliver what he promised in light of the groundbreaking results that he obtained in the field of descriptive psychology. His perspective reconstruction of logic had been elaborated in the course of his antecedent teaching activity in Würzburg. However, it had its full disclosure only by the work of one of his students, namely Franz Hillebrand (1863-1926), in his Die neuen Theorien der kategorischen Schlüsse (1891), where the new system took the name of “idiogenetic” theory of judgment. In the last phase of his career Brentano even returned to revisit his logical reform with some major revisions. On this occasion, the genealogy of the idiogenetic Urteilstheorie can be reconstructed, and its impact assessed, from its early gestation to later radicalization.

Please note that, on this occasion, the talk will be held in Italian.

More information can be found on our website. Do not hesitate to contact historyofl...@gmail.com for any questions you might have.

Kind regards,

Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona