On July 14, 1866 Stumpf met Franz Brentano for the first time during the disputation of his habilitation at the University of Würzburg. This meeting was crucial for the young musician who, in his memoirs on Brentano, said he was impressed by the elegant manner with which Brentano argued for and defended his thesis (Stumpf 1924, 391). According to Brentano's main thesis, "the true method of philosophy is nothing other then that of the natural sciences" (Stumpf 1922, 70). It prescribes the use of

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... the inductive method in philosophy and it convinced several of his students that the future of philosophy could be something quite different from what was taught at that time in the departments of philosophy in Europe. This is certainly the impression that Brentano's disputatio left with Stumpf, and this encouraged him to attend Brentano's lectures in the fall semester and to abandon his studies in law to undertake studies in philosophy. Thus, during the period from 1867 to 1870, Stumpf attended Brentano's lectures on metaphysics, Comte's positivism, logic, and the history of philosophy. However, since Brentano was no longer authorized to supervise theses, he recommended that Stumpf, and later Anton Marty, move to Göttingen to study with Hermann Lotze. Between 1867 and 1868, Stumpf studied mainly psychology, the history of philosophy up to Kant, the philosophy of nature, and practical philosophy, and attended the lectures of the physiologist G. Meißner and the physician W. Weber. After his promotion in August 1868 with a dissertation on Plato (1869), Stumpf returned to Würzburg to study with Brentano. In 1869, Stumpf entered the ecclesiastical seminary in Würzburg but resigned shortly after due to the influence of Brentano and Lotze (Stumpf 1924, 393-94; 1919, 22ff). He returned to Göttingen in 1870 to prepare his habilitation on mathematical axioms (1870) under the supervision of Lotze and defended it successfully in October of the same year. He became, at the age of 22, lecturer at the University of Göttingen and a colleague of Lotze. During the three years he spent in Göttingen as Dozent, he undertook his first extensive research on the history of the concept of substance and then abandoned it shortly after to begin, in 1872, a study on space perception (Stumpf 1924, 395). This study resulted in an important book, Über den Ursprung der psychologischen Raumvorstellung, which appeared in the fall of 1873 and placed Stumpf in a position to replace Brentano in Würzburg,