Liliana Albertazzi – författare

In many respects, Brentano conducted pioneering analyses of problems that are currently in the focus of cognitive science and artificial intelligence: from the problem of reference to that of representation, from the problem of categorial classification to ontology and the cognitive analysis of natural language.

Brentano, in fact, dealt with and wrote on questions concerning the auditory stream (temporal apprehension), visual perception (continua, point of view, three-dimensional construction of phenomenal objects), intentionality, imagery, and conceptual space, considering these pertaining to a metaphysical enquiry. Moreover, Brentano displayed clear awareness of the complexity of problems and of the interrelations among different areas of inquiry. From this point of view, his theory, however complex, offers elements for the treatment of problems currently under investigation.

Brentano''s work is an antidote against physicalism and logicism, which dominated the 20thcentury epistemology, and as such appears to be a good philosophy candidate for cognitive science."A set of knotty questions are implied in the very title of Brentano''s work "Psychology from an empirical standpoint". To solve them, Albertazzi guides us systematically through Brentano''s life and works, investigating into the inherent complexity of both his view of mental life and the related methodology. In so doing, she discloses a number of threads into the open texture of modern philosophy of mind."

Lia Formigari, Ordinary professor of Philosophy of Language, La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

A unique feature of this book is that chapters favor that line of cognitive linguistics which makes a clear distinction between real world and projected world. Information conveyed by language must be about the projected world. Both the experimental results and the systematic claims in this volume call for a weak form of whorfianism. Also, chapters add some relatively unexplored issues of bilingualism to the well-known ones, such as gender systems in the bilingual mind, context and task, synergic concepts, blending, the relationship between lexical categorization and ontological categorization among others.