It has been called Brentano's best known work[1] and has been compared to the physician Wilhelm Wundt's Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie and the Project for a Scientific Psychology of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

[2] Brentano was at work on Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1873, while travelling in Europe after leaving the Roman Catholic Church and resigning from his position at the University of Würzburg.

Brentano originally intended to produce a large work consisting of six books, the first five of which would cover psychology as a science, mental phenomena in general, and their three basic classes, while the sixth would deal with the mind-body problem, the soul, and immortality.

Glymour considers Brentano's efforts "lame" in comparison to the work of the physician Carl Wernicke, who produced a new analysis of the capacity for language.

It gave rise to Husserlian phenomenology, but it also lies at the root of much of the thinking of analytic philosophers on meaning and reference and on the relations of language and mind.

Through Brentano's illustrious circle of students it exerted a wide influence on philosophy and psychology, especially in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Italy."

Simons compares the influence of Brentano's work to that of Wilhelm Wundt's Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, also published in 1874.