–––, 1937, “Stumpf’s ‘Introduction to Psychology’,” The American Journal of Psychology, 50: 33–56. Lewin, K., 1937, “Carl Stumpf,” Psychological Review, 44: 189–194.
Phenomenology is the belief that an individual is formed from the way he or she reacts to the phenomena they encounter every day. Carl Stumpf was an influential psychologist who started as a philosopher and took phenomenology, which had largely been treated as a philosophical concept, and adapted it to psychology.
Carl Stumpf ( German: [ʃtʊmpf]; 21 April 1848 – 25 December 1936) was a German philosopher, psychologist and musicologist. He studied with Franz Brentano at the University of Würzburg before receiving his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1868.
Stumpf attended the local Gymnasium, where he developed a passion for philosophy, especially the works of Plato, before enrolling at the University of Würzburg at the age of 17. He spent one semester studying aesthetics and one studying law.
Carl Stumpf, German philosopher and theoretical psychologist noted for his research on the psychology of music and tone. Stumpf was influenced at the University of Würzburg by the philosopher Franz Brentano, founder of act psychology, or intentionalism. Appointed lecturer (Privatdozent) at the
In 1894 Stumpf entered the most influential phase of his career as professor of philosophy and director of the institute of experimental psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin.
Köhler’s doctoral thesis with Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin (1909) was an investigation of hearing. As assistant and lecturer at the University of Frankfurt (1911), he continued his auditory research. In 1912 he and Kurt Koffka were subjects for experiments on perception conducted by Max Wertheimer, whose….
In 1912 he and Kurt Koffka were subjects for experiments on perception conducted by Max Wertheimer, whose…. Kurt Koffka. > Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin and received his Ph.D. degree in 1909.
Koffka was associated with the University of Giessen (1911–24) and served as a subject (1912), along with Köhler, in experiments on perception conducted by Wertheimer. Their findings led Koffka, Wertheimer, and….
Appointed lecturer ( Privatdozent) at the University of Göttingen in 1870, he wrote his first important work, Über den psychologischen Ursprung des Raumvorstellung (“The Psychological Origins of Space Perception”) ...
Edmund Husserl: Lecturer at Halle. …went—with a recommendation from Brentano—to Carl Stumpf, the oldest of Brentano’s students, who had further developed his psychology and who was professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Halle. In 1887 Husserl qualified as a lecturer in the university ( Habilitation ).
1867–1868 Because Brentano had not been habilitated to supervise dissertations, it was recommended that Stumpf study with Hermann Lotze in Göttingen.
First published Wed Jan 28, 2009; substantive revision Tue Jan 29, 2019. The name Carl Friedrich Stumpf (1848–1936) is historically associated with one of the most important philosophical trends in the early twentieth century, phenomenology. Stumpf supervised Husserl’s habilitation thesis in Halle in 1887 and the latter’s seminal work on ...
Most studies on the relationship between Stumpf and Lotze emphasize Lotze’s theory of local signs (see W. R. Woodward, 1978; Fisette, 2006, 2012; B. Centi, 2011) and the problem of the origins of space perception, which is in fact the central theme of Stumpf’s Raumbuch (Stumpf, 1873; M. Kaiser-El-Safti, 1994; D. Pradelle, 2015). In this book, dedicated to Lotze, Stumpf offers a summary of the debates between philosophers, scientists, and psychologists on the origins of space perception since Fechner. In the preface to this book, Stumpf explains that his starting point is the controversy between nativism and empiricism triggered by Helmholtz in his Handbuch (H. von Helmholtz, 1910, vol. 3, § 25) while his inspiration lies in Lotze (1852) Medizinischer Psychologie . Lotze’s influence on the young Stumpf’s thought is not limited to his doctrine of local signs as Stumpf repeatedly emphasized (R. Rollinger, 2008; N. Milkov, 2015; D. Fisette, 2009b). Beyond the question of influence, Stumpf assigns a central role to Lotze’s thought in the history of philosophy and associates him with a renaissance of philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century (Stumpf, 1907).
1928 Celebrated his 80 th anniversary for which an allocution was given by his friend and colleague Max Planck. 1936 Carl Stumpf died on December 25 in Berlin at the age of 88.
Philosophy of mind or what is called descriptive psychology represents one of the main axes of Stumpf’s program in philosophy. His treatises in this domain are quite diversified, ranging from animal and developmental psychology to acoustic psychology and Gestalt psychology. Other than his Raumbuch, the book that made Stumpf renowned in psychology is Psychology of Sound (published in two volumes in 1883 and 1890) which was widely received in Germany and England (see reviews by P. Natorp, A. Meinong, T. Lipps and J. Sully). In this book, as in most of his treatises on psychology, Stumpf’s approach is similar to that of Brentano’s descriptive psychology. It differs from experimental and physiological psychology in that it conceptually analyses and describes what physiological psychology explains through the descriptive apparatus of the natural sciences such as biology or physiology. Between these two branches of psychology there is a form of division of labor wherein the first analyses and describes what the other explains. However, descriptive psychology has a methodological priority over experimental psychology in that the analysis and description of the explanandum is a prerequisite to its explanation. The two main tasks assigned to descriptive psychology are the analysis and the classification of mental states (also called acts or mental functions). In his influential study entitled “Phenomena and Mental Functions,” Stumpf shows how phenomena are closely linked in that they form a real unity, which can only be separated by abstraction. He conceives of phenomena as unitary wholes and not as aggregates, and claims that they are perceived as concrete and unitary wholes. As such, phenomena are the contents of sensations that are characterized by certain properties or attributes, for example extension, intensity, brightness, etc., and these contents of sensations are first-order phenomena as opposed to second-order phenomena like “mnemonic images” and phenomena such as color or sound, to the extent that they “are merely represented.” Although Stumpf rarely uses the concept of intentionality, one might say that mental functions are distinct from physical phenomena in that they are related to their objects by intentional relations.
1848 Carl Friedrich Stumpf was born on April 21, 1848 in Wiesentheid in Franconia, Germany.
1890 Published the second volume of Tonpsychologie. He also worked with H. Ebbinghaus, H. von Helmholtz, and G. E. Müller, among others, on the prestigious journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, of which Stumpf was one of the founding editors.
Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, a short biography of Stumpf in German
Carl Friedrich Stumpf was born on April 21, 1848 in Wiesentheid in Franconia, Germany.
What Stumpf calls phenomenology in his two Academy treatises of 1906 is a field of study to which he dedicated many works, from his early investigation on the origin of spatial perception up to his 1926 book on vowels and phonetics. Note that this phenomenology is not to be confused with that of his student Husserl, whether in the latter's Logical Investigations , in which it is defined as descriptive psychology, or in his subsequent books, namely the first book of Ideas, in which it is understood as a transcendental phenomenology, and refers to a general program in philosophy. On the one hand, the field of phenomenology in Stumpf's sense is limited to phenomena and their properties, and is defined narrowly as a science of phenomena; on the other hand, while recognizing the significant contribution made by Husserl to phenomenology, Stumpf believes that the very idea of a “pure” phenomenology in Ideas I is simply a contradiction in itself. Stumpf's phenomenology is also different from Mach's phenomenalism and the latter's conception of the objects of physics as “permanent possibilities of sensation,” to use the expression found in J.S. Mill. Mach's doctrine of elements, while making an important contribution to the domain of phenomenology, must be dissociated from his empiricism, according to which objects of physics, just as those of psychology, are reducible to elements or to complexes of elements. Stumpf's reference regarding phenomenology is that of the physiologist E. Hering. Hering deserves merit for having recognized, for physiology and psychology, the importance of a preliminary study of phenomena and having thus conferred a privileged status to the field of phenomenology, in comparison to that of physics and physiology, serving as a starting point for empiricists such as Helmholtz. In fact, by adopting this starting point in Sehdinge, Hering would have recognized the methodological primacy of phenomenology over the other sciences and its propaedeutic status in the study of the essential properties or attributes (space, intensity, brightness, etc.) of sense phenomena.
Descriptive psychology represents one of the main axes of Stumpf's program in philosophy. His treatises in this domain are quite diversified, ranging from animal and developmental psychology to acoustic psychology and Gestalt psychology. Other than his Raumbuch, the book that gave Stumpf a certain renown in psychology is Psychology of Sound (published in two volumes in 1883 and 1890) which was widely received in Germany and England (see reviews by P. Natorp, A. Meinong, T. Lipps and J. Sully). This book deals with phenomena related to the perception of sounds, specifically with judgments caused by sounds; Stumpf developed several important concepts such as analysis, attention, relations, and the well-known concept of fusion, which is the basis of his theory of music. The first volume deals with isolated sound judgments while the second, dedicated to Brentano, studies the consciousness of simultaneous sounds. In his initial plans, Stumpf's objective was to write two more volumes. The third was to focus on musical phenomena such as consonance, dissonance, chords, melodies, etc., while in the fourth he planned to study feelings generated by sound [ Tongefühle ]. Part of his research on these issues was published separately in his Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft [9 volumes].
In an article published in 1891 under the title “Psychology und Erkenntnistheorie” Stumpf criticized both the Kantians, who tried to liberate the theory of knowledge from psychology, and psychologists who claim in general to reduce the theory of knowledge and philosophy to psychology. Remember that this was the first article that addressed the issue of psychologism directly, and we know the influence this paper exerted on Husserl's arguments against the logical psychologism in his Prolegomena. Kant's position, which served as a starting point for Stumpf in this article, was that of the neo-Kantian W. Windelband who had been using the term psychologism since 1877 in a pejorative sense to denounce opponents of Kant or those who, like Fries and Beneke, advocated a psychological interpretation of his philosophy. According to Stumpf's diagnosis, the neo-Kantian argument against psychologism was that psychology can never lead to the knowledge of “general and necessary truths” and that we can even ignore it altogether since, as Kant argued in the first Critique, the sources of knowledge lie in a priori forms of intuition and thought. This form of antipsychologism can therefore be described as metaphysical in the same sense as the postulate of an empty space. Stumpf recognized the value of the Kantian's objections directed against psychologism, including the normative nature of laws, but he argued that it was wrong to deny any contribution made by psychology to the theory of knowledge. Excluding psychology altogether in the theory of knowledge amounts to refusing the important and indispensable resources which we need to account for the origin of those categories and synthetic judgments for which Kantianism has no explanation.
The study of formations and of objects of thought in general belongs to this second neutral science called “eidology,” an expression that Stumpf borrowed from Herbart. Stumpf first introduced the notion of formation [ Gebilde] in 1902 in order to characterize the specific contents of functions or what he also calls the objective correlates of a psychical function. Formations are contents that enter into the consciousness by carrying out specific functions in the sense that to every class and subclass of acts there corresponds a certain content specific to each and every act. All psychical functions, from the simplest to the most complex, have their specific contents: concepts, states of affairs and values, to name only the most important ones. For example, the act of abstraction, which is responsible for the formation of concepts, namely the concept of space, has a concept as its own specific content. States of affairs are contents of judgment, and they are comparable to Meinong's objectives, Husserl's objectivity, and Bolzano's “proposition in itself,” and they play a central role in Stumpf's logic. They are “correlates” of thought, and contrary to individual acts, they have an objective character. The objectivity of formations, however, is not to be understood in terms of intentional inexistence (Brentano) or in the sense of Platonic realism (Bolzano and Frege), because any formation is logically dependent of the act that produces it, and the existence of states of affairs is logically linked to that of the act of judgment. States if affairs are therefore abstracted in the sense that they cannot exist independently of the acts by which they are produced. The same rule can be found in the field of more complex functions such as emotions, desires and voluntary actions, whose specific contents are values. The very possibility of a neutral science such as eidology shows that we can study values for themselves, independently of functions. Yet Stumpf claims that it is not possible to dissociate formations from their original functions.
It differs, however, from experimental and physiological psychology in that it conceptually analyzes and describes what physiological psychology explains through the descriptive apparatus of natural sciences such as biology or physiology. Between these two branches of psychology there exists a form of division of labor wherein the first analyses and describes what the other explains. There is however a methodological priority to descriptive psychology compared to experimental psychology, in that analysis and description of the explanandum is a prerequisite to its explanation. The two main tasks assigned to psychology are the analysis and classification of mental states, also called acts or mental functions. In his influential study entitled “Phenomena and Mental Functions,” Stumpf shows how these are closely linked in that they form a real unity, which can only be separated by abstraction. He conceives of phenomena as unitary wholes and not as aggregates, and claims that they are perceived as concrete and unitary wholes. As such, phenomena are the contents of sensations that are characterized by certain properties or attributes (e.g. extension, intensity, brightness), and these contents of sensations are first order phenomena, as opposed to second order phenomena such as “mnemonic images” or color and sound, to the extent that these “are merely represented.” Although Stumpf rarely uses the concept of intentionality, one might say that mental functions are distinct from phenomena in that they relate to the objects with which they have an intentional relation. This relation is characterized, on the one hand, by the notion of specific content or what he also calls a formation, [ Gebilde ] and on the other hand, by the quality and matter of a function.