Intentionality, ethology and education: the approaches between John Stuart Mill and Franz Brentano

Abstract

The point of this paper is to present the historical introduction of the notion of intentionality as it occurred in the context of philosophical and scientific research on the ethology, namely the science of the formation of character. My argumentative strategy will be to maintain that both John Stuart Mill, in his work Logic of the Moral Sciences, and Franz Brentano, in his work Psychology from an Empirical Stand Point, explicitly agreed that psychology would be the science of elementary laws of mind and Ethology would be the science that correspond to art education in the broadest sense. So at first, I will analyze the converging points of both theories and, second, I will argue that the fundamental difference between the Psychologies of Mill and Brentano was the fact that Brentano's thesis did not recognize the fundamental Millian’s assumption, i.e., the assumption that the causal relationship between psychic’s phenomenon should be the Psychology object of study, from which the psychics’ law would be established. My analysis intend to demonstrate that, for Brentano, the psychical phenomenon while matter of study of Psychology, is itself the fundamental relation between physical phenomenon and psychic phenomenon. This fundamental relation would be characterized by its intentional nature, which made explicit the description of physical phenomenon as the content or the object of the psychic phenomenon. The consequence of this brentanian's thesis imply that the theoretical basis of Ethology also result from the investigation of the intentional nature of the psychic phenomenon.