Awalnya imam Katolik, Brentano menarik diri dari imamat pada 1873 karena definisi dogmatis dari infalibilitas kepausan dalam Pastor aeternus. Kemudian berkarya sebagai profesor non-denominasional, ajarannya memicuriset dalam serangkaain besar bidang seperti linguistik, logika, matematika, dan psikologi eksperimental melalui generasi filsuf muda yang dikenal sebagai Mazhab Brentano.
↑Robin D. Rollinger, Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, p. 7.
↑Gestalt Theory: Official Journal of the Society for Gestalt Theory and Its Applications (GTA), 22, Steinkopff, 2000, p. 94: "Attention has varied between Continental Phenomenology (late Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and Austrian Realism (Brentano, Meinong, Benussi, early Husserl)".
↑Robin D. Rollinger, Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, p. 114: "The fact that Brentano [in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint] speaks of a relation of analogy between physical phenomena and real things existing outside of the mind obviously indicates that he is a realist and not an idealist or a solipsist, as he may indeed be taken to at first glance. Rather, his position is a very extreme representational realism. The things which exist outside of our sensations, he maintains, are in fact to be identified with the ones we find posited in the hypotheses of natural sciences."
