 From his two mentors Brentano and Lotze, Stumpf inherited a marked interest in the history of philosophy. This interest was not strictly historiographical: his point of departure was Brentano’s theory of the four phases in the history of philosophy, and he worked out his own philosophy of history, which constitutes the basis of his diagnosis on the state of philosophy in the nineteenth century, which is inseparable from the way he conceived of philosophy. In his first address as the rector of the university of Berlin delivered in 1907 under the title “Renaissance of Philosophy,” exactly a hundred years after Fichte’s “Address to the German Nation” at the same university, Stumpf applied this philosophy of history to the nineteenth century and asked whether philosophy at this time belonged to an ascending stage of history and whether it tended towards a renaissance of philosophy. He identified two factors which marked the development of philosophy during this period: the empty space left by the decline of speculative philosophy of German idealism during the first half of the nineteenth century, and the remarkable development of psychology and of the physiology of senses during the second half of this century, due to the works of physiologists and physicists such as Fechner, Weber, Hering, and Helmholtz. These two factors corresponded to two divergent philosophical orientations at the time when Stumpf was undertaking his studies in philosophy. The first was the Kantian tradition in its different ramifications, including Neo-Kantianism; the second corresponds to what he called Erfahrungsphilosophie or philosophy of experience, which began with Fechner and above all with Lotze’s works on psychology and more particularly on the problem of space perception. Although it does not represent a homogeneous tradition, the philosophy of experience refers to common features of several schools and currents of thought which attempted to bring philosophy closer to natural sciences, and more particularly to the “new psychology”, which was neglected and relegated to the background by the other tradition. Corresponding to these two orientations are two different ways of doing philosophy: the philosophy of experience starts from below, and like any empirical science, uses the inductive method. They differ from an a priori and speculative approach to philosophy which favors an autocratic regime entirely disconnected from the empirical.