Carl Stumpf (; 21 April 1848 – 25 December 1936) was a German philosopher, psychologist and

musicologist Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some m ...

. He is noted for founding the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology. He studied with

Franz Brentano Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano (; ; 16 January 1838 – 17 March 1917) was an influential German philosopher, psychologist, and former Catholic priest (withdrawn in 1873 due to the definition of papal infallibility in matters ...

at the University of Würzburg before receiving his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1868. He also tutored the

modernist literature Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented ...

writer Robert Musil at the

University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative ...

, and worked with

Hermann Lotze Rudolf Hermann Lotze (; ; 21 May 1817 – 1 July 1881) was a German philosopher and logician. He also had a medical degree and was well versed in biology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws and relations, then de ...

, who is famous for his work in perception, at Göttingen. Stumpf is known for his work on the ''psychology of tones''. He had an important influence on his students

Wolfgang Köhler Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he prote ...

and

Kurt Koffka Kurt Koffka (March 12, 1886 – November 22, 1941) was a German psychologist and professor. He was born and educated in Berlin, Germany; he died in Northampton, Massachusetts from coronary thrombosis. He was influenced by his maternal uncle, ...

who were instrumental in the founding of ''Gestalt'' psychology as well as

Kurt Lewin Kurt Lewin ( ; 9 September 1890 – 12 February 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. During his professional career Lewin applied hi ...

, who was also a part of the Gestalt group and was key in the establishment of experimental social psychology in America. Stumpf is considered one of the pioneers of

comparative musicology Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dim ...

and ethnomusicology, as documented in his study of the origins of human musical cognition ''The Origins of Music'' (1911). He held positions in the philosophy departments at the Universities of Göttingen, Würzburg, Prague, Munich and Halle, before obtaining a professorship at the

.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Early life

Carl Stumpf was born in Wiesentheid, Franconia, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, to a prominent family. His father was the country court physician, and his immediate family included scientists and academicians, like his grandfather, who studied eighteenth century French literature and the philosophers Kant and Schelling. Stumpf showed precocious musical talent as a child, learning the violin by the age of 7. By age 10, he had learned five other instruments and wrote his first musical composition.''History of Psychology'', Fourth Edition, McGraw-Hill Co., 2004.

Education

Stumpf was sickly as a child so his early education was conducted at home with his grandfather as his tutor. Stumpf attended the local ''Gymnasium'', where he developed a passion for philosophy, especially the works of

Plato Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...

, before enrolling at the University of Würzburg at the age of 17.Autobiography of Carl Stumpf
He spent one semester studying aesthetics and one studying law. Then, in his third semester, he met

, who taught Stumpf to think logically and

empirically In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...

. Brentano's lectures were also attended by Anton Marty, Carl van Endert, Ernst Commer, Ludwig Schütz, and Hermann Schell. Brentano also encouraged Stumpf to take courses on the natural sciences because he considered both the substance and methods of science important to philosophy. After two semesters of studying with Brentano and with encouragement from his mentor, he transferred to the University of Göttingen to study under

, a German perceptual theorist. There he was awarded a doctorate in 1868. In 1869, he entered a seminary, intending to be a

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

priest. However, he disagreed with the dogma of the

papal infallibility Papal infallibility is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, in virtue of the promise of Jesus to Peter, the Pope when he speaks '' ex cathedra'' is preserved from the possibility of error on doctrine "initially given to the apos ...

so he returned to the University of Göttingen for his doctorate. He was awarded '' venia legendi'' for philosophy in 1870 after completing his thesis on mathematical axioms, which he wrote in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

Academic career

Soon after, Stumpf was granted a position as an instructor at the University of Göttingen in the Department of Philosophy. There Stumpf met Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner, and served as an observer in their psychological experiments. Their careful approach to a problem of aesthetics, specifically the visual appeal of rectangles of different proportions, appealed to Stumpf and reinforced the notion learned from Brentano that psychological acts or functions can be studied empirically. In 1873, Stumpf returned to the University of Würzburg as a professor in the Department of Philosophy. Although he was forced to teach all of the philosophy and psychology courses due to Brentano's forced departure from the university, Stumpf completed his first major psychological work, an examination of visual perception, particularly depth perception. He proposed a nativist explanation for depth perception, and his book has been cited as an outstanding early contribution to the debate between the ''nativist'' and ''empiricist'' views of perception. He disputed the Kantian notion of space as an "a priori form of intuition" in his book, ''On the Psychological Origin of the Presentation of Space'' (1873). He argued that the status of space is ''Teilvorstellung'' or a "partial presentation", one that must be experienced as part of a broader presentation. In 1894, Stumpf was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the

. At Berlin, he also held an adjunct appointment as director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Berlin. The Institute originally occupied three dark rooms, but by 1920, had moved to twenty-five rooms in the former Imperial Palace. In 1896, Stumpf presided over the Third International Congress of Psychology, and delivered the inaugural address on the relation between mind and body; he advocated an interactionalist position that opposed the popular notion of psychophysical parallelism. Finally, from 1907 to 1908, Stump served as the rector of the

Phenomenology

Stumpf began his work on the sensation and perception of tones, called ''Tonpsychologie'' (''Tone Psychology''), in 1875. Originally meant to be a four volume set, the first two volumes were published in 1883 and 1890, but the majority of the third volume was published as ''Konsonanz und Dissonanz''. Considered his greatest contribution to psychology, the study employs a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical observations. He discusses intervals and series of tones, along with single tones. He distinguished between phenomena and mental functions, suggesting that phenomena such as tones, colors, and images are either sensory or imaginary. Stumpf termed the study of such phenomena as '' phenomenology''. He did a wide range of studies of the phenomenological characteristics of the sounds of different instruments, the determinants of melody, tonal fusion, and the consonance and dissonance of tones. This research was made possible by the excellent collection of acoustic devices at the Institute of Physics. Stumpf's work on phenomenology influenced Edmund Husserl, who is considered the father of the school of phenomenology.

Sensational phenomena

In 1903 and 1904, Stumpf was involved in two well-publicized debunking episodes related to sensational phenomena. First, an engineer from Prague claimed to have invented a machine that could change photographs of sound waves into sound. Stumpf, after attending a demonstration, wrote an article challenging its legitimacy, causing it to never be heard about again. However, the case of Clever Hans, an apparently brilliant horse owned by Wilhelm von Osten, was even more sensational.

Later years

The majority of Stumpf's later work did not include sensational or interesting research, like that of Clever Hans. With the outbreak of World War I, many students left the Institute of Experimental Psychology to fight in the war. Furthermore, the war between Germany and the allied nations disrupted many professional relationships he had with other psychologists. Stumpf retired from the

in 1921 and was succeeded as director of the psychological institute by his former student,

Works in translation

* Stumpf, C.: 'The Origins of Music', ed. and trans. David Trippett. Oxford University Press, 2012. * Stumpf, C.: 'Tone Psychology: Volume I', ed. and trans. Robin D. Rollinger. Routledge, 2019.

Notes

References

* Sprung, H., 2006: ''Carl Stumpf – Eine Biografie. Von der Philosophie zur Experimentellen Psychologie''. Munich/Vienna: Profil. * Bonacchi, S. and Boudewijnse, G.-H. (eds.), 2011: ''Carl Stumpf – From Philosophical Reflection to Interdisciplinary Scientific Investigation''. Wien: Krammer. * Benjamin, Ludy T., 2007. ''A brief history of modern psychology''. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. * Padilla Gálvez, J., 2021: ''State of Affairs. Reconstructing the Controversy over Sachverhalt'', Munich: Philosophia Verlag.

External links

Short biography, bibliography, and links on digitized sources
in the

Virtual Laboratory The online project Virtual Laboratory. Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930, located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is dedicated to research in the history of the experimentalization of life. T ...

of the

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (German: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte) is a scientific research institute founded in March 1994. It is dedicated to addressing fundamental questions of the history of knowledg ...

Autobiography
from ''History of Psychology in Autobiography'' Vol. 1 (1930), pp. 389–441, at

York University York University (french: Université York), also known as YorkU or simply YU, is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's fourth-largest university, and it has approximately 55,700 students, 7,0 ...

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