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Hintikka questions the principled division between analytic and continental philosophy by arguing that Mach should be considered the century’s most influential philosopher, a giant on whose shoulders thinkers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Heidegger subsequently stood. Hintikka notes that Frege’s direct influence on philosophy proper outside of logic and the foundations of mathematics was for a very long time quite minimal. Mach’s wider impact is measured in the great importance to much 20th-century philosophy of the question whether knowledge may be given to us apart from what is conceptualized in thought (in, e.g., pure sense perception, intuition, or the sensory given). Mach’s phenomenalism (or phenomenology) set the agenda, according to Hintikka, for future discussion of this question in philosophy and in physics. Mach’s disputes with Bolzmann about the reducibility to knowledge of sensation affected Einstein. Hintikka argues that both Husserl and the early Wittgenstein embraced phenomenological conceptions of experience and knowledge that were indebted to Mach’s ideas. Heidegger was therefore wrong to insist that phenomenology and phenomenalism are distinct philosophical traditions.

Husserl’s notion of the intentional object may be compared and contrasted with Bolzano’s and Frege’s views on the reference of linguistic expressions, especially since Bolzano was a main influence on the development of Husserl’s views. Føllesdal responds to David Bell’s criticisms of Føllesdal’s earlier readings of Husserl on reference, directedness, and the notion of a determinable object x. He argues that Husserl’s treatment of indexicals and reference is in some ways more insightful than the treatments of either Bolzano or Frege. To preempt the charge that Husserl’s philosophy forwards a naïve, overly mentalistic model of the mind and its expressive capacities, Føllesdal mentions that Husserl developed a thought experiment nearly identical to the well-known Twin Earth scenario later framed by Hilary Putnam to criticize internalist, mentalistic theories of meaning. Føllesdal argues that Husserl was ahead of his time in trying to account for the semantics of indexical and demonstrative terms, partly under the influence of Brentano. This study shows that the opposition between so-called continental and so-called analytic philosophy is not historically as well-grounded as many have supposed.