Background
Wundt, Wilhelm Max was born in 1832 in Mannheim.
physiologist psychologist research
Wundt, Wilhelm Max was born in 1832 in Mannheim.
Studied Medicine at the Universities of Tübingen, Heidelberg and Berlin.
Privatdozent, Helmholtz Physiological Institute, Heidelberg. 1857; Professor of Inductive Philosophy, Leipzig, 1875.
Wilhelm Wundt is widely acknowledged as the founder of experimental psychology. He is believed to have formed many of his philosophical ideas in his early twenties, during a long convalescence from a serious illness. As a young man in Heidelberg he worked at the Physiological Institute on sense perception and related problems. This led directly to his recognition of the need for a scientific psychology rooted in physiology. After his appointment as Professor of Inductive Philosophy at Leipzig he founded the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie, thereby establishing the prototype for modern departments of experimental psychology. Wundt believed that conscious processes should be investigated both by experiment and by introspection. Experimental methods, he held, created the conditions under which introspection could yield exact data and knowledge of causal relations. However, this approach was most fruitful for relatively simple mental activities, like perception. At this level simple associationism could be helpful; though it is necessary to postulate a ‘prineiple of creative resultants’ to explain how perception comes to involve more than the mere addition of stimuli. The cultural world could not be understood in these terms, however. This world, a world of motives, purposes and reasons, was better investigated through anthropological work on such phenomena as myth and custom. Wundt’s two main psychological works reflect this divide, the Physiologische Psychologie (1874), and the Völkerpsychologie [Anthropological Psychology] (1917-1926). As a philosopher Wundt would have studied logic and philosophy as part of his scientific training, but he was otherwise largely selftaught. He had wide-ranging interests: ethics; the philosophy of science; and the mind-brain problem. He held that logic, as a theory of the form of synthetic thought, underpinned the methodologies of all sciences. However, psychology was the link between scientific and cultural knowledge and hence ’preparatory’ to philosophy. Wundt was a prolific writer and an inspiring teacher whose students founded laboratories for experimental psychology in many parts of the world. Emil Kraepelin. whose nosology of psychiatric disorders remains the basis of modern classifications, worked with him in Leipzig. The tension in his work between positivism and idealism sometimes led him into inconsistency, and his hopes for unifying science through psychology as a basis for philosophy have not been realized. The contrasting aspects of human experience with which he was concerned—mind and culture, cause and volition, subjective and objective knowledge—remain unreconciled in the psychology he helped to establish.