Call for Papers: Emotions and intrinsic value: Brentano and the transformation of sentimentalism
This special issue is devoted to the philosophical investigation of emotions and value within the tradition inaugurated by Franz Brentano and developed by the Brentano School, as well as to its decisive influence on twentieth-century value theory.
The Brentano School articulated one of the most systematic modern accounts of affectivity as intentional and value-disclosing. Against both reductive moral psychologism and formalist ethical theory, Brentano advanced the thesis that emotions are not merely subjective states but intentional acts capable of correctness and incorrectness. To say that something is good, Brentano argued, is to say that it is correct to love it. This fitting-attitude conception of value—later central in analytic metaethics—originates in the Brentanian framework.
A central aim of this special issue is to situate the Brentano School within the broader history of moral sentimentalism and to clarify how Brentano transforms that tradition through his theory of intentionality.
Eighteenth-century British moral philosophy—especially in Anthony Ashley Cooper, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith—grounded moral evaluation in affective response. Moral approval and disapproval were understood not primarily as intellectual apprehensions of objective moral properties but as sentiments: feelings of approbation or disapprobation, sympathy, or aversion.
However, in much of this tradition, sentiments were treated as psychological reactions whose normative authority remained philosophically delicate. If value depends on feeling, how can it avoid relativism or subjectivism?
Brentano inherits the central sentimentalist insight—that emotion is constitutive for value—but transforms it through his theory of intentionality and correctness. Unlike Humean sentimentalism, Brentano does not treat emotions as merely causal responses or projections. Instead, emotions are intentional acts that present their objects under the guise of the good, and they are subject to standards of correctness analogous to truth in judgment.
Where Hume claims that morality is “more properly felt than judged,” Brentano argues that love and hate can be right or wrong. In this way, he integrates sentimentalism into a realist framework: emotions are not brute feelings but intentional acts; value is not projected but disclosed; and normativity is grounded in the correctness conditions of affective acts rather than in custom or sympathy alone.
This move preserves the phenomenological insight of sentimentalism while avoiding its slide into subjectivism. It also anticipates contemporary fitting-attitude theories of value, which analyze goodness in terms of appropriate pro-attitudes.
In this respect, Brentano stands at a pivotal point in the history of moral philosophy: he bridges British sentimentalism, nineteenth-century descriptive psychology, and twentieth-century analytic value theory..
This special issue seeks to reassess Brentano’s conception of the third class of mental phenomena (Gemütsbewegungen) and its legacy across ethics, aesthetics, religion, and economics. We welcome contributions that explore both the historical development and the systematic significance of this tradition.
Articles should be submitted by January 31, 2027, and the special issue will be published in the first half of 2027 in the journal Geltung – Journal of Studies on the Origins of Contemporary Philosophy. For more information on submissions and guidelines, please visit our website: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/geltung/about/submissions.
Submission Deadline (CFP): January 31, 2027
Guest editors: Prof. Dr. Federico Boccaccini; Prof. Dr. Evandro O. Brito
