You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 363 is something like, are there ethical truths? And if so, how can we know them? We read Franz

Brantano's lecture, The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong in 1889. More information

about the text in the podcast, please see partially examined life.com. This is Mark Linsonmeyer

in Madison, Wisconsin, who in choosing the Twitter handle, Big Balls, 2025, is exhibiting a preference with the character of rightness.

This is Seth Paskin, carrying no innate moral principles in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes All one, trying to live intentionally in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

All right, all right. So we're entering a new unit, you might say.

We want to go back to ethics.

We had Edith Stein on our list for a while.

We also had this related one from Max Scheler.

These are both early 20th century followers of Husserl in Germany phenomenologists, so moral phenomenology,

and it became clear that the Shaler was earlier than the Stein, and Stein refers to the Shaler,

so I was like, all right, we'll do that first. Well, then I started the Shaler, and it referred to

this lecture by Franz Brantano, who is the grandfather of phenomenology.

If Edmund Husserl is the father of phenomenology, Brentano is the grandfather.

I have his fat psychology book.

I think we want to do that.

It's probably as important as the William James psychology book that we spent quite a bit

of time on from around the same period of time. He invented the idea of intentionality, the aboutness of, I don't know if he

invented it, but he's the one that everybody refers to, the aboutness of mental contents,

so that at least in general, you don't have a belief. Yeah, I think he did. He invented intentionality?

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