The History of Philosophy Working Group will meet on January 21st at 12:15 in E212. Christof Rapp will present on ''Young Brentano and Aristotelian Categories in the 19th Century"
Abstract: In nineteenth-century Germanophone philosophy, the Aristotelian categories became a hot topic (again) owing to Kant's and Hegel's charge that Aristotle's list of categories had been arbitrarily thrown together ("rhapsodisch ... auf gut Glück", "aufgerafft"). My talk aims at situating Franz Brentano's doctoral thesis Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862) within this debate. It challenges a nowadays widespread view according to which Brentano's account rests on an allegedly Neoplatonic or neo-scholastic commitment to the univocity of being. I argue, on the contrary, that Brentano's project is best understood as an attempt to reconcile two approaches that had emerged in the preceding debate: Trendelenburg's account of the categories as originating in different linguistic patterns, and Bonitz's (partly Kant inspired) understanding of them as the highest classes of thinking and being. Brentano's so-called deduction of the categories seeks to show how irreducible classes of predicates, distinguished by their different relations to primary substance, correspond to different, non-univocal senses of being. Their unity is secured not by a common genus but by their focal reference to primary substance. The talk further situates Brentano's procedure within the broader nineteenth-century practice of grouping or clustering the categories in order to counter the charge of arbitrariness inherited from Kant and Hegel. It argues that Brentano's deduction is continuous with this practice, although his claim to establish the completeness of the categories goes beyond what the procedure can warrant.