The academic debate of the early twentieth century witnessed resurging interest in the problem of reality as a foundational concern of philosophy and science. The advent of critical realism continued discursive tensions of the previous century. Oswald Külpe contributed to this revitalisation by defending inductive metaphysics as the proper methodology to engage with the problem. Alongside his efforts, Moritz Geiger and Max Scheler sought after alternatives beyond realism and idealism in philosophy but also beyond psychology of consciousness or unconscious mechanisms of the soul. They did so on the basis of phenomenological considerations but also by continuing the traditions of philosophical psychology from the nineteenth century, rooting their ideas in the discourse on reality and approximating the standpoint of ideal-realism. The phenomenologists contemplated the consequences of this view for psychology but ultimately did not develop a complete psychological account, thus relinquishing the approach to the theoretical psychology of the future and its discourse on the problem of subject-matter.