What does it mean for a thought, idea, belief, or wish to be about something? And what do we mean when we say that we are aware of thinking, presenting, believing, or wishing when we do? Much of the philosophy of mind of the 20th and 21st centuries has focused on these two questions. Perhaps due to a certain dominant way of doing the history of philosophy in England and the United States after the Second World War, the history of these two questions—intentionality and consciousness—has often been reduced to specific and recent discussions. This history has frequently taken classical contributions as its starting point, such as Ryle's conception of the mind–body problem in metaphysics (Ryle, 1949), Chisholm's intentional account of reference in the philosophy of language (Chisholm, 1955) and Nagel's discussion of the qualitative character, the ‘what-it-is-likeness’ of experience (Nagel, 1974), including some more recent classical assessments, such as those of Dennett (1991) and Searle (1992).

By now, it should be well recognised that the history of these questions offers more than met the eye of some analytic philosophers in the middle of the 20th century. In fact, both questions were at the centre of Franz Brentano's project in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, published a century before the discussion initiated by Nagel et al. Meanwhile, Brentano's significance has been well established by Chisholm's work and that of later philosophers, such as Barry Smith, Peter Simons and Kevin Mulligan, who contributed decisively to the broader reception of Brentano and Austrian philosophy in the past 40 years. We are now in a better position to appreciate the extent of Brentano's project, not only for its treatment of intentionality and consciousness but also for matters related to the theory of values, metaphysics and epistemology.

Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint investigated the mind's elements and their relations, an enterprise that he later called in his lectures descriptive psychology, descriptive phenomenology, psychognosy, phenomenognosy or, sometimes, simply phenomenology. Bearing these central questions of intentionality and consciousness in mind and looking back at the phenomenological project underlying their assessment, it is striking to see how Brentano's project combined in a unified way investigations pertaining to what today we often see as two distinct methodologies or philosophical traditions; descriptive psychology is indeed both an analysis of the mind and a phenomenology of experience. In Brentano's view, these two tasks comport perfectly. In the past, analytic philosophers and phenomenologists may have focused on distinct, specific aspects of Brentano's legacy, but it seems that, as the papers in this special issue suggest, we are coming back to Brentano's original view of descriptive psychology or phenomenology in the treatment of our two questions.

Let us consider intentionality. Brentano's theory of intentionality is probably his most important legacy in 20th-century philosophy. It is the foundation of Husserl's entire phenomenology, and it both directly and via Husserl influenced the views of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and many other philosophers in the continental tradition. In particular, Heidegger's reception of Brentano's intentionality thesis in the terms of the being-in-the-world of a Dasein has been decisive in the development of 20th-century philosophy, from French phenomenology to Dreyfus's works on Heidegger and the cognitive sciences.

Remarkably, at a time when the differences between the analytic and continental traditions drew increasing critical notice—think of the Royaumont Conference of 1958—it was by drawing upon the resources of Brentano's theory of intentionality that Roderick Chisholm reintroduced intentionality in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language of his era. One of his central ideas was that reports of intentional acts and states have logical-linguistic features that violate basic laws of the semantics of names and sentences. First, these reports violate the ‘law of existential generalisation’: one cannot conclude from ‘S thinks of a’ that ‘there is an a’ or that ‘there is not’ (compare to ‘S hits a’). Second, they violate the ‘law of substitutivity of coreferential terms salva veritate’: one cannot conclude from ‘S thinks that the author of the Analects is b that ‘S thinks that Confucius is b’. Finally, they violate (what might be called) the ‘law of alethic generalisation’: one cannot conclude from ‘S thinks that a is b’ either that ‘a is b’ is true or that it is false (we follow Feldman and Feldman, 2019; Jacob, 2023).

These striking phenomena have generated much discussion in the analytic tradition and thus fostered what one might term a ‘Chisholmian phase’ in the reception of Brentano. They have been used to argue that intentionality exhibits logical-linguistic particularities that may complicate attempts to reduce it to any other kind of entity, including physical entities. The discussions in contemporary philosophy of mind were indeed (and remain) very much focused on the question of the reducibility or non-reducibility of the mental to the physical, and, in this respect, Brentano played a major role in contemporary philosophy.

However, it has also been argued that the phenomena identified by Chisholm may indeed be sui generis and irreducible yet remain about linguistic entities, to wit, names and sentences. Now, one could argue that the question of the irreducibility of the mental is not well framed if one discusses it by pointing to apparently irreducible phenomena that are not themselves mental (even if they constitute reports about the mental).

Another difficulty that the reducibility camp faces is that of the qualitative nature of intentionality. It indeed seems—at least, some people argue—that experiencing an intentional act or state comes with a certain feel; that is, there is a phenomenology of intentionality or a something-it-is-likeness present in an intentional episode that is not found in other, non-mental events. Brentano has been praised for having seen this, as he claims that intentionality is always conscious. This has been so extensively stressed and discussed in recent years that a distinct ‘phenomenology of intentionality’ phase has emerged in the reception of Brentano that, superseding Chisholm's approach, now overwhelmingly dominates the discussions inspired by Brentano and finds several echoes in the papers in this special issue.

In parallel to the reducibility question, studies on intentionality since Chisholm have devoted much effort to understanding what might (following Alberto Voltolini) be called the ‘structure of intentionality’ Chisholm and subsequent authors have produced reams on the relationality or non-relationality of intentionality in general and specifically on that question in Brentano. It has been argued that Brentano switched from a relational account of intentionality, in which all intentional acts have (at least) an immanent object (that is, a mind-dependent object) to an adverbialist understanding of intentionality, in which the directedness of the act is understood as monadic, having no need to posit any object in the mind (see for instance Chrudzimski, 2001).

Usually, immanent objects are greeted with scepticism by philosophers, who argue, among other things, that they threaten our cognitive access to the outer world. This also explains why many philosophers and many readers of Brentano privilege an adverbialist approach to intentionality. However, the adverbialist interpretation of Brentano has been less interesting to intentionalists, among them Tim Crane, who, by contrast, praise Brentano for accepting representational content in his philosophy and thus are generally more attracted by Brentano's early theory of intentionality. Brentano's notion of the immanent object has also been positively welcomed by Textor (2017), who suggests understanding it as something close to a mode of presentation and shows its relevance to contemporary discussions of the structure of our mental acts. Thus, Brentano also plays a central role in contemporary discussions of the structure of intentionality.

Brentano has been valued for studying not only the structure of intentionality in general but also that of specific mental acts, such as presentations, judgements and emotions. His studies of this last category of acts continues to attract much attention in recent philosophy from scholars such as Kevin Mulligan. In particular, the fact that Brentano intimately connects inquiries about emotions to those about values—and even defines emotions as relations to values—has inspired several contemporary authors.

Brentano's reception in 20th-century philosophy took a different path in regard to the second question—consciousness—mainly because his views on consciousness were not received with the same enthusiasm as his views on intentionality. As already noted, it is well known that Brentano took the view that all mental acts are conscious; that consciousness represents the fact that mental acts are directed not only at sensory contents but also, incidentally and through what he calls ‘inner perception’, at themselves; and that inner perception is epistemically infallible. His student Husserl was among the first to oppose these views, especially the second and third. Against the second, Husserl held that mental acts with their content cannot be the object of some inner perception in the same way as a house is the object of my seeing, as mental acts are intrinsically subjective and the subjective constituents of experience do not stand before us as objects. Against the third view, he raised the plausible objection that some experiences are definitely conscious experiences, such as hearing a melody over time, although they do not have the epistemic authority of inner perception in Brentano's sense, given that they exceed the now-point of experience on which this epistemic authority is based. These objections were very influential in their own right and because they became central aspects of Husserl's own phenomenology; respectively, they are at the heart of his view on the pre-reflexive nature of consciousness and of his view of consciousness as a flow and not a now-point as Brentano has it.

As most phenomenology after Husserl followed Husserl's view on consciousness, it is unsurprising that Brentano's views on consciousness have been largely ignored by later phenomenologists, such as Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It was only in the late 1990s, when many philosophers were looking for alternatives to higher-order theories of consciousness, that Brentano's views on consciousness came back on the philosophical scene thanks to discussions initiated by Zahavi (1998) and Thomasson (2000). The appeal of Brentano's model was obvious: pace Husserl's critique, Brentano's view on one's mental phenomena being conscious ‘on the side’ of (and not the target of) this very mental phenomenon inspired various new accounts of inner awareness, which have shaped many discussions in the philosophy of mind and phenomenology in the past 20 years, both from a more systematic standpoint and from a historical perspective, as an opportunity to reassess Brentano's views independently of Husserl's critique.

Let us close this introduction with a few words on the rationale behind this special issue on Brentano. Many of the articles presented here emerged from a conference on descriptive psychology that we organised in Salzburg in 2018. Descriptive psychology, we said, is both a descriptive analysis of the mind and a phenomenology of experience. Now, what is this descriptive analysis? It overlaps, of course, with the idea of conceptual analysis, and this is certainly one of the reasons why analytic philosophy in the 20th century showed so much interest in Brentano. In his lectures on descriptive psychology, one learns that his psychology concerns the ‘analysis’ of the ‘content’ of concepts. This analysis, in turn, is made possible by a previous ‘analytic description of phenomena,’ by which Brentano means mental acts and states and their intentional correlates. In fact, one could argue that, if Bolzano may be regarded as the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Brentano is certainly its most insightful uncle.

Descriptive analysis, however, embraces more than conceptual analysis; it is also, and more essentially, an analysis of the mental that demands training and attention as well as experimentation. In all these three aspects, which are basically facets of what we have called the phenomenology of experience, descriptive psychology is perfectible. We cannot only improve our causal answers—for instance, we no longer account for pain in terms of the ‘firing of the C cells’—but also improve our descriptive answers. This is perhaps best illustrated by the collection of articles in this special issue. For instance, Anna Giustina shows that some of Brentano's doubts about the possibility of introspection can be defused if, as she does, we argue for introspection without phenomenal modification. Arnaud Dewalque draws on Brentano's distinction between implicit and explicit inner awareness to propose an alternative to the inner sense theories of consciousness, and Charles Siewert shows the potential of descriptive psychology in dealing with first-person reflection in a way that avoids some common objections to introspection put forward by introspection sceptics, such as Dennett and Schwitzgebel. Guillaume Fréchette shows how Brentano's descriptive psychology of the individuation of the senses offers a viable alternative to some views defended today in the philosophy of perception. From a more general perspective, Johannes Brandl proposes comparing Brentano's enterprise of a ‘descriptive psychology’ with others adopting the same label, such as those of Dilthey and Lotze, and suggests seeing the general project of descriptive psychology as a way of overcoming the restraints imposed by language on our study of the mind.

Other articles tackle specific problems of Brentano's descriptive psychology. Denis Seron proposes a reconstruction of two apparently incompatible positions in Brentano, namely his empiricism and his belief in the a priori truth of certain laws of descriptive psychology. Hamid Taieb evaluates the various ontological accounts of the individuation of mental acts defended by Brentano over his career, Michelle Montague proposes seeing Brentano's theory of intentionality as a theory of relations and Olivier Massin suggests that the reactive theory of emotions, inspired by Brentano, may be superior to Brentano's own attitudinal theory of emotions. We also find the same rationale in the discussion of Uriah Kriegel's book on Brentano by Angela Mendelovici, Jonas Olsson and Mark Textor, who discuss Kriegel's reading of Brentano as a systematic philosopher and a forerunner of the theory of phenomenal intentionality, focusing on Kriegel's understanding of consciousness and intentionality in Brentano as well as his understanding of values, emotions and the will, all while (at least implicitly) also evaluating the method of descriptive psychology.

对于某件事的想法、想法、信念或愿望意味着什么？当我们说我们在思考、呈现、相信或希望时意识到我们是什么意思？20 世纪和 21 世纪的大部分心灵哲学都集中在这两个问题上。也许是由于二战后英国和美国研究哲学史的某种主导方式，意向性和意识这两个问题的历史常常被简化为具体的、近期的讨论。这段历史经常以经典贡献为起点，例如赖尔在形而上学中对心身问题的概念（Ryle，  1949），奇泽姆在语言哲学中有意提及的说明（奇泽姆，  1955 ））以及内格尔对经验的定性特征、“相似性”的讨论（内格尔，  1974），包括一些最近的经典评估，例如丹尼特（1991）和塞尔（1992）的评估。

到目前为止，我们应该充分认识到，这些问题的历史提供的内容超出了 20 世纪中叶一些分析哲学家的视野。事实上，这两个问题都是弗朗兹·布伦塔诺（Franz Brentano）的《从经验角度看心理学》项目的核心，早于 Nagel 等人发起的讨论一个世纪发表。与此同时，奇泽姆和后来的哲学家，如巴里·史密斯、彼得·西蒙斯和凯文·马里根，充分确立了布伦塔诺的重要性，他们在过去的 40 年里为布伦塔诺和奥地利哲学得到更广泛的接受做出了决定性的贡献。我们现在能够更好地理解布伦塔诺项目的范围，不仅因为它对意向性和意识的处理，而且还因为它涉及与价值理论、形而上学和认识论相关的问题。

布伦塔诺的心理学从经验的角度研究了心灵的元素及其关系，他后来在他的讲座中将这一事业称为描述心理学、描述现象学、心理诊断学、现象诊断学，有时简称为现象学。。牢记意向性和意识的这些核心问题，并回顾其评估背后的现象学项目，令人惊讶的是布伦塔诺的项目如何以统一的方式结合了与今天我们经常看到的两种截然不同的方法论或哲学传统相关的研究；描述心理学确实既是对心灵的分析，也是对经验的现象学。在布伦塔诺看来，这两项任务完美契合。过去，分析哲学家和现象学家可能关注布伦塔诺遗产的独特、具体方面，但正如本期特刊中的论文所表明的那样，我们似乎又回到了布伦塔诺在治疗中描述心理学或现象学的原始观点。我们的两个问题。

让我们考虑一下意向性。布伦塔诺的意向性理论可能是他在 20 世纪哲学中最重要的遗产。它是胡塞尔整个现象学的基础，它直接或通过胡塞尔影响了海德格尔、萨特、梅洛-庞蒂和许多其他大陆传统哲学家的观点。特别是，海德格尔从此在的在世存在的角度对布伦塔诺的意向性命题的接受，对于20世纪哲学的发展具有决定性作用，从法国现象学到德雷福斯关于海德格尔和认知科学的著作。

值得注意的是，在分析传统和欧陆传统之间的差异引起越来越多的批评关注的时候（想想 1958 年的鲁奥蒙会议），正是通过利用布伦塔诺意向性理论的资源，罗德里克·奇泽姆在心灵哲学和哲学中重新引入了意向性。他那个时代的语言哲学。他的中心思想之一是，对有意行为和状态的报告具有逻辑语言特征，违反了名称和句子语义的基本规律。首先，这些报告违反了“存在概括法则”：人们不能从“S想到a ”得出“存在a ”或“不存在”的结论（与“S击中a”相比）'）。其次，它们违反了“共指词替代性法则”：不能从“S认为《论语》的作者是b ”得出“S认为孔子是b ”的结论。最后，它们违反了（可能被称为）“道德概括法则”：人们不能从“S认为a是b ”得出结论，“ a是b ”是真的还是假的（我们遵循费尔德曼和费尔德曼） ，2019；雅各布，2023）。

这些引人注目的现象在分析传统中引起了很多讨论，从而在布伦塔诺的接受中促进了人们所谓的“奇泽姆阶段”。他们被用来争论意向性表现出逻辑语言的特殊性，这可能会使将其简化为任何其他类型的实体（包括物理实体）的尝试变得复杂。当代心灵哲学的讨论确实（并且仍然）非常集中在精神到物理的可还原性或不可还原性问题上，在这方面，布伦塔诺在当代哲学中发挥了重要作用。

然而，也有人认为，奇泽姆所识别的现象确实可能是自成一类且不可还原的，但仍然与语言实体有关，即名称和句子。现在，人们可能会说，如果通过指出本身不是心智的明显不可约现象（即使它们构成了关于心智的报告）来讨论心智不可约性问题，那么这个问题就没有得到很好的框架。

还原性阵营面临的另一个困难是意向性的定性本质。确实，至少有些人认为，体验有意的行为或状态会带来某种感觉；也就是说，在有意的事件中存在着一种意向性的现象学或一种类似的东西，而在其他非心理事件中是找不到的。布伦塔诺因看到这一点而受到赞扬，因为他声称意向性总是有意识的。近年来，这一点得到了如此广泛的强调和讨论，以至于在布伦塔诺的接受中出现了一个独特的“意向性现象学”阶段，取代了奇泽姆的方法，现在压倒性地主导了受布伦塔诺启发的讨论，并在本文中的论文中找到了一些呼应。专刊。

与可还原性问题并行，自奇泽姆以来对意向性的研究投入了大量精力来理解什么（在阿尔贝托·沃尔托里尼之后）可以被称为“意向性的结构”。奇泽姆和后来的作者对意向性的关系性或非关系性进行了大量研究。一般性的，特别是在布伦塔诺的这个问题上。有人认为，布伦塔诺从对意向性的关系性解释（其中所有意向行为都（至少）有一个内在对象（即依赖于心灵的对象））转变为对意向性的副词主义理解，其中意向性的定向性行为被理解为一元的，不需要在头脑中放置任何对象（例如参见 Chrudzimski，  2001）。

通常，哲学家对内在客体持怀疑态度，他们认为，除其他外，内在客体威胁着我们对外部世界的认知。这也解释了为什么许多哲学家和布伦塔诺的许多读者优先采用副词主义方法来研究意向性。然而，意向主义者对布伦塔诺的副词主义解释不太感兴趣，其中包括蒂姆·克兰，相比之下，蒂姆·克莱恩赞扬布伦塔诺接受其哲学中的表征内容，因此通常更被布伦塔诺的早期意向性理论所吸引。布伦塔诺的内在客体概念也受到了 Textor 的积极欢迎（2017），他建议将其理解为接近于一种表达方式，并表明它与当代关于我们心理行为结构的讨论的相关性。因此，布伦塔诺在当代意向性结构的讨论中也发挥着核心作用。

布伦塔诺不仅因为研究一般意向性的结构，而且还因为研究特定的心理行为（例如表达、判断和情感）而受到重视。他对最后一类行为的研究继续引起凯文·穆里根等学者在近代哲学领域的广泛关注。特别是，布伦塔诺将情感的探究与价值观的探究紧密地联系起来，甚至将情感定义为与价值观的关系，这一事实启发了几位当代作家。

布伦塔诺在20世纪哲学界对第二个问题——意识——的接受采取了不同的路径，主要是因为他的意识观点没有像他的意向性观点那样受到热烈欢迎。正如已经指出的，众所周知，布伦塔诺认为所有心理活动都是有意识的。意识代表了这样一个事实，即心理活动不仅针对感官内容，而且还附带地通过他所谓的“内在知觉”针对心理活动本身；这种内在感知在认识上是无误的。他的学生胡塞尔是最早反对这些观点的人之一，尤其是第二和第三种观点。针对第二种观点，胡塞尔认为精神活动及其内容不能成为客体。某种内在感知的感觉，就像房子是我所看到的对象一样，因为心理活动本质上是主观的，而经验的主观成分并不作为对象出现在我们面前。针对第三种观点，他提出了合理的反对意见，即某些体验绝对是有意识的体验，例如随着时间的推移听到一段旋律，尽管它们不具有布伦塔诺意义上的内在感知的认知权威，因为它们超出了现在的点这种认知权威所依据的经验。这些反对意见本身就具有很大的影响力，因为它们成为胡塞尔自己的现象学的核心方面。它们分别是他关于意识的前反射本质的观点的核心，以及他将意识视为流动而不是布伦塔诺所认为的现在点的观点的核心。

由于胡塞尔之后的大多数现象学都遵循胡塞尔的意识观，因此布伦塔诺的意识观在很大程度上被海德格尔、萨特和梅洛-庞蒂等后来的现象学家所忽视也就不足为奇了。直到20世纪90年代末，当许多哲学家正在寻找高阶意识理论的替代品时，布伦塔诺的意识观点才在扎哈维（Zahavi，1998）和托马森（Thomasson，2000）发起的讨论中重新回到哲学舞台。）。布伦塔诺模型的吸引力是显而易见的：与胡塞尔的批判步伐一致，布伦塔诺关于一个人的心理现象是有意识地“站在”这种心理现象的“一边”（而不是其目标）的观点激发了对内在意识的各种新的解释，这些解释形成了许多讨论过去20年对心灵哲学和现象学的研究，无论是从更系统的立场还是从历史的角度，作为独立于胡塞尔的批判重新评估布伦塔诺观点的机会。

让我们用几句话来谈谈布伦塔诺特刊背后的基本原理来结束本介绍。这里介绍的许多文章来自我们 2018 年在萨尔茨堡组织的描述心理学会议。我们说，描述心理学既是对心灵的描述性分析，也是对经验的现象学。现在，这个描述性分析是什么？当然，它与概念分析的思想重叠，这无疑是20世纪的分析哲学对布伦塔诺表现出如此大兴趣的原因之一。在他关于描述心理学的讲座中，人们了解到他的心理学涉及对概念“内容”的“分析”。反过来，这种分析是通过先前的“现象的分析描述”成为可能的，布伦塔诺的意思是心理行为和状态以及它们的意向关联。事实上，有人可能会说，如果博尔扎诺可以被视为分析哲学的祖父，那么布伦塔诺无疑是分析哲学最有洞察力的叔叔。

然而，描述性分析不仅仅包括概念性分析。更本质上，它也是一种对心理的分析，需要训练、关注和实验。在所有这三个方面，也就是我们所说的经验现象学的基本方面，描述心理学是可以完善的。我们不仅可以改进我们的因果答案——例如，我们不再用“C 细胞放电”来解释疼痛——而且还可以改进我们的描述性答案。本期特刊中的文章集也许最好地说明了这一点。例如，安娜·朱斯蒂娜（Anna Giustina）表明，如果我们像她一样，在不进行显着修改的情况下主张内省，那么布伦塔诺对内省可能性的一些怀疑就可以消除。阿诺·德瓦尔克（Arnaud Dewalque）利用布伦塔诺（Brentano）对内隐和外显内在意识的区分，提出了意识的内在感觉理论的替代方案，而查尔斯·西沃特（Charles Siewert）则展示了描述性心理学在处理第一人称反思方面的潜力，从而避免了一些对内省的常见反对意见由丹尼特和施维茨格贝尔等内省怀疑论者提出。纪尧姆·弗雷谢特（Guillaume Fréchette）展示了布伦塔诺（Brentano）的感官个性化描述心理学如何为当今感知哲学中捍卫的某些观点提供了可行的替代方案。从更普遍的角度来看，约翰内斯·布兰德尔建议将布伦塔诺的“描述心理学”事业与其他采用相同标签的人（例如狄尔泰和洛采的事业）进行比较，

其他文章解决了布伦塔诺描述心理学的具体问题。丹尼斯·塞隆提出重建布伦塔诺的两个明显不相容的立场，即他的经验主义和他对描述性心理学某些定律的先验真理的信仰。哈米德·泰布（Hamid Taieb）评估了布伦塔诺（Brentano）在其职业生涯中所捍卫的精神行为个体化的各种本体论描述，米歇尔·蒙塔古（Michelle Montague）提出将布伦塔诺的意向性理论视为一种关系理论，而奥利维尔·马辛（Olivier Massin）则认为受布伦塔诺启发的情感反应理论可能是优于布伦塔诺自己的情绪态度理论。我们在安吉拉·门德洛维奇 (Angela Mendelovici)、乔纳斯·奥尔森 (Jonas Olsson) 和马克·特克斯特 (Mark Textor) 所著的乌利亚·克里格尔 (Uriah Kriegel) 关于布伦塔诺 (Brentano) 的书的讨论中也发现了同样的理由，