Abstract The book traces the anti-metaphysical orientation of (much of) analytic philosophy back to discussions in Austro-German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. The starting-point of the book is the debate over the relation between empirical science (here: psychology) and metaphysics: does psychology need a metaphysics of mental substances? The negative answer informed Austrian philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century and provided a model for ontologies that dispense with substances. The book introduces Brentano’s Intentionalism and Mach’s Neutral Monism as two anti-metaphysical views in the study of mental phenomena. It goes on to use the Austrian ‘psychology without a soul’ view as a vantage point from which to reconstruct and assess the immediate prehistory and formation of analytic philosophy (Ward, Stout, Moore, Russell). While Austrian philosophers retired the soul, early analytic philosophers were happy to introduce a successor, the subject, and conceive of the mental as constituted by subject–object relations. The final part of the book returns to the theme of anti-metaphysics from a different perspective. It focuses on Moritz Schlick’s arguments for the conclusion that metaphysics lies beyond the limits of knowledge, arguments that are rooted in the philosophy of mind discussed in previous parts.
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