Are There Tropes According to Early Brentano?

Bernhard Ritter (University of Graz, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Copenhagen)

Abstract: Some commentators have claimed that Brentanian accidents are closely similar to so-called ‘tropes’. These latter are identified by other commentators with both Aristotle’s things that are accidentally in a subject (cf. Cat., 1a23–29) and early modern ‘modes’ (as found, e.g. in Descartes, Prin. Phil. I, lx–lxiv). ‘Accidents’ in later Brentano, however, are modelled on the ‘accidental beings’ or entia per accidens from Aristotle’s later work (cf. Met., Ζ.7 1028a18–28). It is thus false to assimilate them to either of the last two categories since an ens per accidens is a thus-and-so-qualified substance. The fact that Brentanian accidents have been assimilated to both, however erroneously, shows that the question of whether Franz Brentano admits of tropes is moot; more precisely, whether he conceives of exemplified qualities as particulars, i.e. numerically distinct unrepeatables. It is hardly a coincidence that Brentano gets interested in individuation at the time of his first and unrealised dissertation project, i.e. around 1860, on Francisco Suárez. The late-scholastic Jesuit is not only one of the first to conceptualise the idea of a mode, he is also one of the earliest authors to thoroughly investigate the principles of individuation of various types of things. Individuation is one of Brentano’s most distinctive interests, and one whose development this talk will aim to trace with a special focus on qualities. It depends on how these views developed whether Brentano could have transmitted the (arguably) Aristotelian idea of particularised accidents to his pupils, e.g. Edmund Husserl, as some would have it. Brentano’s ontology is still viewed too exclusively through the lens of his posthumously published Theory of Categories (Kategorienlehre).

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