Uriah Kriegel's Brentano's Philosophical System: Mind, Being, and Value is a good illustration of how fascinating a subject the history of philosophy can be. It contextualizes and scrutinizes Brentano's philosophy and explains the many ways in which it offers alternatives to currently dominant paradigms. Although the book is written in a spirit clearly sympathetic to Brentano's system, Kriegel is up front about its weakness and shortcomings. This is not to say, however, that his attempts to mend them are all satisfactory.

My focus will be on the book's third part, which is about Brentano's theory of value. I shall consider three problems, the first two of which Kriegel also considers. The first is that Brentano's analysis of value in terms of fittingness gets the order of explanation backwards. In Section 3, I shall argue that Kriegel's conclusion that there is a good response available to Brentano can be bolstered if Kriegel's formulation of Brentano's “fitting attitude” account is revised. The second problem, to be discussed in Section 4, is that Brentano's account lacks the resources to accommodate betterness and worseness and degrees of value. In Section 5, finally, I consider briefly the “partiality problem” for the fitting attitude account of value, and how it applies to Brentano's version of it.

First of all, I provide some necessary background concerning relevant parts of Brentano's philosophy, which I intend not to be in tension with Kriegel's interpretation.