Sonia Kamińska

There are two types of philosophy of mind in Brentano: (A) Aristotelian, and (B) genuinely Brentanian. The former (A) is to be found in the Aristotelica series; and by (B) I understand the content of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.  The manuscripts for its unwritten parts and Brentano’s lectures on God and immortality of the soul surprisingly fall into A . These lines of thought are so different that it can be astonishing that they were authored by one person. In my paper I will try to show the roots of this dichotomy as well as to check whether there is a conflict between these theories, and, if so, whether they can be reconciled. These are not only two different philosophical theories, but at least one of them is a manifestation of a world view, and a key to it can be found in Brentano’s biography.

This text aims to show that the core of human divinity according to Aristotle is exercising the divine mind for its own sake. Being happy and thus divine is auto-teleological, and must not be reduced to any sort of instrumental value. This reading of Aristotle excludes the theist interpretations of Prime Mover as well as the attempts at identifying the human mind with God, mainly because both these (different) interpretations seem to make auto-teleological bios theoretikos impossible. The first do this by introducing the divine provision which makes people act for God’s sake and not for their own sake. The others reduce the special status of humans by taking away the divine part, in my opinion being the sine qua non condition of the concept of human divinity. All the interpretations of human divinity which I have presented above can be useful nowadays in the ethical, (bio)ethical, social or even political discourse. This shows that the history of philosophy is not only about the past, but also about the future.