ABSTRACT
From my point of view, the Brentano puzzle (Albertazzi, Libardi and Poli, 1996) has two aspects: (i) The quantitative Zeitgeist of psychological science during the second part of the nineteenth century was incompatible with Brentano’s genuinely qualitative approach and (ii) the openmindedness of modem psychology for qualitative analysis can not refer to Brentano because the mental avenue to his Psychology from an empirical point of view is blocked by Husserl’s reinterpretation and his rebuttal of psychologism. While the latter part of the puzzle has been analyzed in detail, the first aspect remains unaddressed because the exclusively quantitative orientation of psychological science at the end of the last century appears alien in the light of today’s psychology where the most stringent tools of experimentation and mathematics are used to build formal models of qualitative change (see Kruse and Stadler, 1995).
