Abstract
This paper is mainly about Brentano’s commentaries on Ernst Mach in his
lectures “Contemporary philosophical questions” which he held one year before he left
Austria. I will first identify the main sources of Brentano’s interests in Comte’s and J. S.
Mill’s positivism during his Würzburg period. The second section provides a short overview
of Brentano’s 1893-1894 lectures and his criticism of Comte, Kirchhoff, and Mill. The next
sections bear on Brentano’s criticism of Mach’s monism and Brentano’s argument against
the reduction of the mental based on his theory of intentionality. The last section is about
Brentano’s proposal to replace the identity relation in Mach’s theory of elements by that of
intentional correlation. I conclude with a remark on the history of philosophy in Austria.