Background
Brandenstein, Bela von was born in 1901 in Budapest.
Brandenstein, Bela von was born in 1901 in Budapest.
Succeeded von Pauler as Professor of Philosophy at Peter Pazmany University, Budapest (1934-1945). Professor at University of Saarbriiken, from 1948.
Brandenstein’s work is an attempt to produce a complete and systematic philosophical account of what there is. Although an eclectic, Brandenstein produced an original ontology, and furnished a Christian theodicy of an unusual kind. They key doctrines are set out in his book of 1950. He contends that the goal of philosophy is to unveil the ultimate properties of being, and its method is ‘regressive inquiry’. This method reveals that being has three ultimate determinations: content, what a being is; form, its relations, at least that of identity; and formation, the unity of a being. Each of these aspects of being has a branch of philosophy proper to it, which Brandenstein calls Totic, Logic and Mathematics. The application of Rückschluss to each subject matter reveals in each case 18 fundamental categories, making 54 in all. Brandenstein distinguishes metaphysics from ontology, and his key assertions in this area concern causality. He contends that an infinite sequence of causes is impossible, and further that, in a finite series, the first member must be intransitive. Again, every real cause he holds to be inexhaustible, intransitive and imperishable, from which it follows that such causes must be spiritual. All causal agency he attributes to finite spirits which guide the course of nature. The cause of the spirits and the matter they mould is God, who preestablished a harmony at the moment of creation. In other works, Brandenstein develops the implications of these views for ethics and aesthetics.