Brentano, Franz [key], 1838–1917, German philosopher and psychologist. He was a teacher (1866–73) at Würzburg, and in 1874 he became professor of philosophy at Vienna. In 1880 he retired to write and study. His best-known book, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874), attempts to establish psychology as an independent science. Brentano believed that mental processes were the data of psychology and were to be regarded as acts rather than as passive processes. He influenced Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong.
See studies by G. Bergmann (1967), A. C. Rancurello (1968), and R. M. Chisholm (1986).
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