Consciousness lived through

Husserl’s reception of Brentano’s inner consciousness

Abstract

The paper aims to examine Brentano's account of inner consciousness and to assess its reception in Husserl's early works. Starting from the preliminary definition of psychic phenomena and an overview of some basic distinctions such as those between inner perception and observation, primary and secondary object, etc., I discuss Brentano's later thoughts in the light of his theory of relation and temporality, exposing a certain inconsistency with his initial assumptions. Subsequently, I examine Husserl's critical reception of inner consciousness in the Logical Investigations (1901) and in his lectures up to 1905, that is up to the first in-depth thematization of temporality, to which inner consciousness will be inextricably related. Indeed, Husserl’s redrafting of the inherited psychologistic lexicon helps to trace a prehistory of his phenomenology of time and to better understand the paradigmatic detachment of phenomenology from descriptive psychology.