Carl Stumpf

Carl Stumpf (born in Wiesentheid in 1848, died in Berlin in 1936) was a German philosopher and psychologist, and also a musician and musicologist. He is usually seen as a bridge between nineteenth-century philosophy of mind and experimental psychology. He belonged to the so-called Austrian school of act psychology, having been one of the first students of Franz Brentano.

He studied first at Würzburg, where he met Brentano, and then at Göttingen, where he took his doctorate in 1868 under Hermann Lotze. He earned his teaching qualification there in 1870 with a Latin thesis on mathematical axioms. He briefly entered a seminary with the aim of becoming a Catholic priest, but left the path because he disagreed with the dogma of papal infallibility. At Göttingen he worked with Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner, observing their psychophysical experiments, which strengthened his view that mental acts could be studied empirically. He taught at Würzburg, Prague, Halle and Munich, and from 1894 at the University of Berlin, where he directed the Institute of Experimental Psychology.

His principal work, the Tonpsychologie, appeared in two volumes in 1883 and 1890. It examines the perception of tones, intervals, consonance and dissonance, combining theoretical analysis with empirical observation. In it he separated phenomena from mental functions and coined the term phenomenology for the study of phenomena as they appear to consciousness. In his 1873 study of spatial perception he rejected Kant's view of space as an a priori form of intuition, arguing instead that space is a partial presentation that is experienced only within a larger one. He also introduced the concept of state of affairs (Sachverhalt), which Husserl later took up.

Stumpf defended an interactionist view of mind and body against psychophysical parallelism. In 1903 and 1904 he took part in investigating sensational claims, including that of Clever Hans, the horse whose supposed talent for arithmetic was refuted by a commission he led and by Oskar Pfungst's later work.

His influence was considerable. Husserl was partly shaped by his ideas, and his students Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, together with Max Wertheimer, helped found Gestalt psychology. His work on the origins of music also places him among the pioneers of comparative musicology.