ABSTRACT
Philosophical traditions are shaped by various factors, which play a more or less important role depending on the context in which the traditions developed. Starting with Franz Brentano’s concern with the centrality of such constitutive features of mental phenomena as consciousness and intentionality and the research conducted by his students on these features, phenomenology rapidly developed into a philosophical discipline with its own journals, institutional centres and internal polemics between competing philosophical agendas, both inside and outside these centres. In the absence of a clear-cut theoretical separation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, it could be more helpful to assess the theoretical relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology from another perspective. Using the realism/anti-realism distinction as an orientation to study the relation between analytic philosophy and phenomenology has an advantage over the “divide” reading.
