With his fourth habilitation thesis, Franz Brentano provoked not only the Würzburg philosophers.
In the period after Kant, philosophy differentiated into various branches (idealism, romanticism, historicism, materialism, neo-Kantianism, etc.) with varying degrees of openness to empirical methods of gaining knowledge. Although even in that period there were great names such as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there can be no such thing as a unified German philosophy. In this state of thought, to propagate the method of natural science as that of philosophy was bound to cause a stir. Whether this was Brentano's goal can hardly be answered. The only thing that is certain is that it was his conviction!