Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano was born on 16 January 1838 in Germany and trained as a Catholic priest before walking away in 1873, unable to accept the newly declared doctrine of papal infallibility. A year later he published Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, the work that would define his career: it argued that mental states are always directed toward something, always "about" something, reviving a scholastic idea that had gone dormant for centuries. Teaching as a secular professor, he gathered around him a cohort that became known as the School of Brentano, young philosophers who carried his methods into linguistics, logic, mathematics, and experimental psychology. He died on 17 March 1917, but the questions he reopened - how consciousness relates to its objects, what makes a thought a thought - became foundational problems for the next century.