Anton Marty was at the centre of one of the most productive traditions in philosophy, which originated in the works and teaching of Franz Brentano and led to Alexius Meinong’s theory of objects, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s ontology of art, and, via Kasimir Twardowski, to the Lvov-Warsaw School. Indeed, several among the theories being argued for or against in the contemporary debate have their forerunners in this tradition. This surely applies to the question whether intentionality should be deemed the ‘mark’ of the mental, a claim that received its—by now classic—formulation in Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). The same also holds true of the debate between one-level and two-level theories of self-consciousness, which owes much to Brentano’s attempt to provide a synthesis between these two accounts. Looking beyond Brentano, we may note that the most influential approach to philosophy of perception, namely the intentional theory, has in Husserl’s writings one of its most sophisticated formulations. The widely discussed realist approach to fictional objects was also developed by Amie Thomasson, following the blueprint of Roman Ingarden’s ontology of literary works. Finally, Meinong was even granted the honour of seeing some of the most distinguished contemporary metaphysicians such as Richard Routley, Terence Parsons, Ed Zalta and Graham Priest (self-)labelled as Meinongians.
However, Anton Marty, a student and lifelong friend of Brentano, has remained on the sidelines. Not only would we be hard-pressed to name contemporary philosophers who consider themselves ‘Martyans’. As it happens, many philosophers would even have difficulty in placing Marty within the history of philosophy.
The reason for the current neglect is mainly due to the fact that Marty is often considered to have simply played the role of the defender of the Brentanian orthodoxy vis-à-vis the innovations introduced by some of his students, first and foremost Meinong and Husserl. True, several pages of Marty’s writings provide sharp and often harsh criticism of heresies such as the introduction of assumptions (Meinong) and symbolic intentions (Husserl) as new fundamental classes of mental phenomena. Many pages are also focussed on defending Brentano’s revision of logic against the criticism raised by philosophers whose names have long been forgotten. Yet this should not overshadow the fact that Marty provides a, previously unparalleled, rich and careful analysis of language, so that we may speak of one of the first philosophies of language worthy of that name (Cesalli and Mulligan 2017: 251). Nor should his interests be seen as confined to language, since he developed an original ontology to address eternal philosophical problems such as, for instance, the objectivity of knowledge and the nature of time and space. Here is where Marty distances himself most dramatically from Brentano’s doctrines. Finally, one may find a common thread running through Marty’s works in his meta-metaphysical considerations on the notions of existence and reality.
This collection of eight original essays pursues the aim of bringing Marty back into the spotlight. It does so by having leading figures in the contemporary debate confront some of his most significant contributions. This undertaking is not devoid of risk since most contributors are not specialists of Anton Marty, nor do they pretend to write as such. As it happens, we would like here to thank them all for accepting this challenge and not shying away from some very technical aspects of Marty’s doctrines and his at times arduous Swiss-German prose. Thus, the aim of this volume is not a reconstruction of Marty’s theories for historical purposes, but rather, that of breathing some new life into his thought, via the lenses of a contemporary perspective.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part is dedicated to themes in philosophy of language (Chapters 2–4), which were at the centre of Marty’s philosophical thinking throughout his life. This interest may be traced back to his dissertation on the question of the origin of language (Marty 1875)—a pivotal topic of the philosophical discussion in the second half of the nineteenth century. A series of articles published in the 1880s and 1890s (Marty 1884, 1894, 1895) focusses on a problem at the crossroads of philosophy of language, logic and linguistics: namely, whether the most general and fundamental form of a judgement should be considered predicative or not. Marty’s opus magnum (Marty 1908) finally provides a full characterization of the scope of the discipline of philosophy of language and its various sub-disciplines. This book also offers Marty’s mature attempt at developing an account of language deeply rooted in the philosophy of mind which he had inherited from Brentano.
The second part focusses on the problem of the objectivity and phenomenology of space and time (Chapters 5–7), upon which Marty was working in the final years of his life. The notes he left have been edited and published posthumously by his students under the title Raum und Zeit (Marty 1916). It may be interesting here to point out that even this study was seen by Marty as subordinated to his focus on language and was intended to lead to a further study on the linguistic expressions relating to space and time. As already noted by Simons (1990), this particular focus allows Marty to develop subtle phenomenological observations and distinguish which aspects of space and time are given intuitively or only discursively. However, the heart of Marty’s book is a defence of the view of space and time as mind-independent existing objects, which are only ‘filled in’ by objects and events, respectively.
The final part (Chapters 8 and 9) turns to Marty’s meta-metaphysical and meta-philosophical considerations. Brentano’s work The Manifold Meanings of Being in Aristotle (1862) made an everlasting impression on the young Marty and led him to pursue his interests in philosophy under the mentorship of its author (see Fréchette and Taieb 2017: 2). Indeed, Marty’s reflections on the notion of being provide a common thread across all his writings. A leitmotiv of these reflections is that language misleads us into making false assumptions about the nature of existence—to wit, to interpret it as a property of objects. Marty’s theory of metaphors—what he refers to as the ‘inner form of language’—places him in a privileged position to generalize this mistrust of language into a full-fledged meta-philosophy: we are systematically misled by our language when we rely on it to advance philosophical theories. From this perspective, Marty presents a strong affinity with ideas one may find in the writings of Wittgenstein and, more generally, in Ordinary Language Philosophy.
- 1.Language and Communication
The first part of the book opens with François Recanati’s contribution (Chapter 2), which explores the possibility of reinterpreting Marty as providing an alternative account of communication to the one offered by Paul Grice. This is an original undertaking since Marty, notwithstanding some crucial differences, is often considered as a forerunner of Grice (see Liedtke 1990; Cesalli 2013; Longworth 2017). Yet Recanati argues that while Grice has built his account of communication on a strict dichotomy between natural and non-natural meaning, Marty allows us to uphold a continuity between them. Crucial to Recanati’s argument is the consideration of the famous Gricean example of King Herod presenting John Baptist’s head to Salome as a sign of John Baptist’s death. Drawing a strict demarcation line between what pertains to natural and non-natural meaning seems to lead to unwanted results in this most telling borderline case. Of equal importance to Recanati is also the interplay of natural and non-natural meaning in indexicals.
In the second chapter of this section (Chapter 3), Mark Textor, not unlike Recanati, ve...