From Aristotelian Logic to Empirical Psychology: Franz Brentano’s Critique of I and O Syllogisms

By Unknown authorPublic Domain

I sit here, the glow of the screen flickering in my tired eyes, trying to make sense of it all. You know, the usual. Nihilism’s grip on me is tighter than ever—an ever-present shadow, waiting to pull me into the abyss.

But today, there’s something different. I’ve got Franz Brentano and his complex web of categorical and judicative judgments rattling around in my brain. The man spent half of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint wrestling with the ancient syllogisms of Aristotle—those I and O judgments that we all love to hate.

It’s absurd, really, how much energy he put into explaining why the great Greek’s logical categories don’t fit the bill for psychology.

Yet, I get it. Somewhere between the dullness of these syllogisms and the existential void, there’s meaning.

I just have to find it—like looking for a spark in the middle of a dark, rain-soaked alley.

Brentano wasn’t just some ivory tower philosopher. He was a man trying to make sense of the soul, of consciousness, and of human experience through the lens of empirical psychology.

He cared about how we judge things—not just whether something is true or false, but how we engage with the world around us.

His critique of Aristotelian syllogisms was more than a footnote in a dusty textbook.

It was a push toward breaking free of rigid, outdated structures—toward understanding human judgment as a living, breathing phenomenon.

The Problem with Aristotelian Logic

Aristotle’s logic is the foundation of Western thought. His syllogisms—those quaint little logical structures we all learned in grade school—are supposed to be the keys to understanding how we reason.

But Brentano, in his rigorous German-academic way, didn’t just accept them at face value. No, he looked at them with the same skepticism I reserve for those god-awful coffee shop philosophers who spout nonsense about “truth” without ever experiencing a bad breakup.

Here’s the deal: Aristotle divided judgments into categorical and judicative types.

Categorical judgments are statements like “All men are mortal,” while judicative judgments are more like, “This man is mortal.”

One is general; the other is more specific. Now, Aristotle used these in his syllogisms to map out all kinds of truths about the world.

But Brentano had a problem with them. He didn’t think these neat little boxes captured the complexity of human consciousness. And he was right.

Brentano’s critique isn’t some esoteric exercise in academic frustration—it’s a challenge to the very framework that limits how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

I and O syllogisms (which are essentially categorical judgments in disguise) just don’t capture the messy, lived experience of the human mind. You can’t boil everything down to tidy logical formulas and expect to understand consciousness.

The Categories: Where Brentano Finds the Flaws

Let’s break it down into something resembling sense—this is philosophy after all, and sense is often in short supply.

Judgment TypeExampleBrentano’s Critique
Categorical“All dogs are mammals.”Too general, misses the nuance of individual consciousness and specific experiences.
Judicative“This dog is a mammal.”More specific but still fails to account for the lived experience of judging this fact.

Brentano wasn’t having any of it. He saw categorical judgments as dry and incapable of capturing the active nature of our minds.

The act of judging something isn’t just about placing it into a category—it’s about engaging with it. There’s a living aspect to human judgment that Aristotelian logic can’t touch.

These judgments don’t speak to how we feel about the world, how we experience it. They don’t capture the richness of the act of consciousness itself.

For Brentano, judicative judgments are better because they imply the mind’s active involvement.

But still, they don’t go far enough. We need a psychology that accounts for this, not just a logic.

That’s where his empirical psychology comes in—he wanted to study consciousness through the act of judgment, not just through abstract, impersonal categories.

And, well, when you spend your life steeped in the absurdities of human thought, you can’t help but yearn for something real.

The Reality Check: Let Me Explain it to You Like You’re Five

Now, kid, if you want to understand this, let me break it down for you in simple terms.

Imagine you have a dog. A dog is an animal. If I told you, “All dogs are animals,” that’s a general statement about dogs, right? That’s like the categorical judgment.

Now, let’s say you’re looking at a dog and I say, “This dog is an animal.” You’re not just making a general statement; you’re looking at that specific dog and making a judgment about it. That’s a little more personal, right? That’s the judicative judgment.

But here’s where Brentano steps in and says, “Hold on, there’s something missing here. You don’t just look at the dog and categorize it. You’re actively thinking about it. You’re engaging with it in a way that logic can’t fully explain. It’s like looking at the dog and thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s a dog. It’s an animal. But also, I like it. It’s my companion. It’s part of my world.’”

That extra stuff, that feeling, that engagement—that’s what logic can’t explain.

Opponents to Brentano: The Skeptics

Of course, not everyone buys into Brentano’s critique. Some philosophers argue that logic can still provide valuable insights into human judgment and that Brentano’s rejection of categorical judgments is a bridge too far.

For instance, Gottlob Frege, one of the greats of modern logic, would’ve likely scoffed at Brentano’s emphasis on subjective engagement with the world.

Frege believed that logic was the pure framework of thought, transcending human emotions and perceptions. In Frege’s world, the truth is cold, hard, and impersonal. Human feelings and engagement have no place in the realm of logical reasoning.

Then there’s Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose later work in the Philosophical Investigations took aim at the very nature of meaning itself.

He might argue that the very distinction Brentano makes between categorical and judicative judgments is a misguided attempt to frame something inherently fluid and context-dependent into rigid categories. “Language games” are messy, after all.

But what if Brentano is on to something? What if human judgment isn’t just about abstract categories but about the whole package—the logic, the emotion, the experience?

In a world where even the greats don’t agree, it’s worth asking.

The Real World: Nihilism, Coffee Shops, and the Absurd

Okay, let’s get real for a second. Nihilism’s out there, and it’s a bastard. We’re all wandering in this desert of meaning, trying to figure out why we bother with any of this philosophy nonsense.

But the thing is, it matters. The search for meaning—whether through psychology, logic, or a coffee shop conversation about Camus—is part of what makes us human.

Think of it this way: you’re sitting in that coffee shop, your head spinning from the nonsense the guy at the table next to you is saying. “Everything is meaningless,” he says. You want to slap him, but instead, you think, “Yeah, maybe he’s right.” Maybe he is.

But your judgment, your engagement with the world, is still yours. Even if logic tells you the universe is empty, your experiences—the dog, the coffee, the moment you finally get what Brentano’s talking about—are real.

So yeah, maybe Aristotle had it wrong. Maybe Brentano had it right. And maybe, just maybe, the meaning we’re searching for is in the mess of human judgment, somewhere between those old syllogisms and the noise in the coffee shop.

You know, the world’s a mess. Your judgment, like mine, is a mix of logic, experience, and all that other crap we try to make sense of. It’s not neat. It doesn’t fit in tidy categories. But that’s what makes it real.

Whether you’re looking at a dog or reading a book or staring into the void, your judgment is yours—and that’s what makes it all worth it.

So let’s grab a drink. Let’s talk about it—because maybe, in the end, that’s all we really have.

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