Brentano's Psychology

Brentano's psychology focuses on understanding how mental activities, like thinking, perceiving, and feeling, are experienced from a first-person perspective. He emphasized that consciousness is always directed towards an object, meaning every mental act has a content—for example, when you think about something or feel an emotion. Brentano believed that studying these mental acts and their intentionality—the quality of being about something—is central to understanding the mind. His approach laid the groundwork for modern phenomenology and emphasized the importance of examining inner experiences to grasp how we perceive and interpret the world.