The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and WrongBrentano, Franz
Philosophy
The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong
Brentano, Franz
Ethics
2. It is false, and a quite unjustifiable supposition when (p. 178)
he ascribes to me the opinion that the classification of judgments
according to quality is the only essential classification belonging
to the act of judgment itself. I believe exactly the contrary. I
regard, for example (of course in opposition to Windelband), the
distinction between assertorical and apodictic judgments (cf. here
note 27, p. 83), as also the distinction between self-evident and
blind judgments as belonging and highly essential, to the act of
judgment itself. Other differences, again, especially the distinction
between simple and compound acts of judgment, I might mention. For
it is not every compound judgment that can be resolved into quite
simple elements, and something similar takes place also in the case
of certain notions, a fact known to Aristotle. What is red?--Red
colour. What is colour?--The quality of colour. The difference, it is
seen, contains in both cases the notion of the genus. The separating
of the one logical element from the other is only possible from the
one side. A similar one-sided capacity to separate appears also in
certain compound judgments. J. S. Mill is, therefore, quite wrong when
he (_Deductive and Inductive Logic_, vol. i. chap. iv. section 3),
regards as ridiculous the old classification of judgments into simple
and compound, and thinks that the procedure in such a case is exactly
as if one should wish to divide horses into single horses and teams
of horses; otherwise the same argument would hold good against the
classification of conceptions into simple and compound.
3. It is false, though an error which finds almost universal
acceptance, and one from which I myself at the time of writing the
first volume of my _Psychology_ was not yet free, that the so-called
degree of conviction consists in a degree of intensity of the
judgment which can be brought into analogy with the intensity of
pleasure and pain. Had Windelband charged me with _this_ error I
would have acknowledged the complete justice of the charge. Instead
of this he finds fault with me because I recognize intensity with
regard to the judgment, only in a sense analogous, and not identical
to that in the case of feeling, and because I assert the impossibility
of comparing in respect of magnitude, the supposed intensity of the
belief and the real intensity of feeling. Here we have one of the
results of his improved theory of judgment!
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