ABSTRACT
Brentano’s lecture reflects very clearly the shift in the philosophical climate of the 1870s. The intellectual dominance of naturalism was coming to an end and post-naturalistic philosophers had begun to explore new ways of philosophizing. They wanted philosophy to be scientific; that is, they were willing to acknowledge the achievements of the sciences and the success of their empirical methodology and they were willing to grant that philosophy could learn from the conscientiousness and precision of scientific procedures. Beyond that they did not always agree on what it meant for philosophy to be scientific, but they all believed that philosophy had a function different from that of the empirical sciences and that it would therefore not dwindle away into them.
