The Basics of Blaustein’s Descriptive Psychology in the Context of Twardowski’s Theory of Presentations

Blaustein’s project of philosophical psychology, for which he used the term “descriptive psychology” (psychologia deskryptywna), was—as already stated in Chap. 3 —deeply rooted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century heritage of psychology; however, Blaustein was a critical reader of this rich legacy. He elaborated different approaches and sought efficient tools to analyze psychic life. Psychology was, for him, a descriptive method which accounted for mental phenomena as wholes that ought to be analyzed or described as a combination of the simplest parts. The general purpose of this discipline was to classify mental phenomena. Nonetheless, whereas Brentano or Twardowski attempted to address a unified and complete taxonomy of mental phenomena, including presentations, judgments, emotions and (eventually defined as a separate class) will, Blaustein instead focused solely on presentations. Of course, in his writings, one finds some clues that he preferred Twardowski’s four-class taxonomy over Brentano’s three-part division; however, again, there is no in-depth discussion of this categorization. Instead, Blaustein formulated an interesting and original analysis of different classes of presentations. With these ideas in mind, the present chapter aims to introduce the basics of Blaustein’s descriptive psychology by discussing the sources, main ideas, arguments, and development of his theory of presentations. By doing so, I will explore the theoretical background of his philosophy, but a few remarks are necessary here.