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…