Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint is a 1874 book by the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano. Its thesis about intentionality - that "Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages call the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object" - is one of the most influential in contemporary philosophy. It gave rise to Husserlian phenomenology, and also lie at the root of much of the thinking of analytic philosophers on meaning and reference and on the relations of language and mind. Brentano's use of the notion of intentionality as a criterion for the demarcation of the psychological realm also pervades much contemporary philosophizing within the realm of cognitive science.^[1]