Background
Külpe, Oswald was born on August 3, 1862 in Kandau, Kurland.
Külpe, Oswald was born on August 3, 1862 in Kandau, Kurland.
Universities of Leipzig, Berlin, Göttingen and Dorpat.
1886-1894, Dozent in Psychology, University of Leipzig. 1894-1909, Professor in Psychology, University of Würzburg. 1909 -12, Professor of Psychology, University of Bonn.
1912-1915, Professor of Psychology, University of Munich.
Kiilpe registered at Leipzig in 1881 to study history, but once he was there his interests were directed by Wilhelm Wundt towards psychology and philosophy. In 1894 Kiilpe moved to Wiirzburg where he founded an institute for psychological experimentation, the Wurzburg School, which achieved renown for its work in the study of thought processes, being associated especially with the thesis that thought is ‘imageless’, that it depends on such conscious attitudes as doubt and certainty rather than on images and sensations. Kidpe’s philosophy was continuous with his psychology. Opposing idealistic neo-Kantianism, he developed a ‘critical realism’, a philosophical position which, while respecting the achievements of Kant in the critique of knowledge, undertook to justify the realism of everyday consciousness and the sciences, that is, to refute the idealist interpretation of the world as a ‘mere representation’. Starting from the ‘given’ and taking into account the results of the empirical sciences, Kiilpe’s aim was to demonstrate the possibility ot arriving at assertions about the general structures of a reality that was independent of consciousness. In this, Kiilpe contended that imagelesS thought is integral to the process through which thought achieves relation to something independent of itself. The critical realism of Kiilpe and hij Wurzburg colleagues represented an important strand ot German philosophy during the early decades o the present century, exerting considerable influence on Joseph Geyser and Nicolai Hartmann m particular.