Abstract

NIEL, Luis. Truth, Judgment and Evidence in Franz Brentano’s Work. Tópicos [online]. 2019, n.37, pp.99-130. ISSN 1666-485X.

The article addresses the issue of truth in Franz Brentano’s work. Without disregarding the fragmentary, unsystematic, and non-definitive character of his ‘theory of truth’, the following proposal consists in gathering and reconstructing his position as presented in conferences, letters and manuscripts, and then showing the richness of his tangle reflections, which I will interpret as a sort of ‘phenomenological description’ of the appearance of truth in its most elementary forms. First, I will analyze his well-known conference from 1889, in which he critically addresses the conceptual limitations of the classical version of truth as adaequatio, and presents, in nuce, some aspects that will be further developed in later writings, such as the relation between truth and intuition. Second, I will focus on his theory of judgment in order to point out his conception that the existential judgment is the most fundamental form of judgment (and not the predicative judgment) and that truth rests in the end upon such existential judgments. Third, I will show how in his last writings, Brentano associates truth with his concept of evidence. I will present his conception of truth as the givenness of something with evidence by means of the existential judgment, basic presupposition for any possible theoretical conception of truth.

Keywords : Brentano; truth; existential judgment; evidence; intuition.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )