The Phenomenology of Knowing: Brentano’s Case Against Kant

I argue that Brentano’s analysis of knowledge is *phenomenological* in a sense yet to be clarified. The primary goal of my paper just is to provide such a clarification. The key idea reads as follows: Brentano’s criticism rests upon a substantial claim about what it is like, for the subject, to know that p (or to know o). I therefore suggest that Brentano’s anti-Kantianism is best reconstructed in terms of what would be called today ‘the phenomenology of knowing that p.’ I believe that this way of putting the argument has several advantages. First, it helps us understand what makes Brentano’s criticism a distinctive variety of anti-Kantianism, which contrasts with the versions of Bolzano and other Austrian philosophers. Next, it also shows that Brentano’s conception of knowledge involves an original contribution to current debates in analytic philosophy of mind about the existence and character of cognitive phenomenology.