Translation Prevod
UDC: IStumpf
Carl Stumpf
Leopold Blaustein
Translated from Polish by Witold Plotka Abstract and keywords prepared by Witold Plotka
Abstract
The text is a posthumous tribute to Carl Stumpf. The text summarizes the main points of Stumpf's philosophy and psychology by tracking the main phases in his philosophical development. The text introduces the notions of phenomenology and eidology.
Phainomena 34 | 134-135 | 2025
Keywords: Stumpf, descriptive psychology, experiments, phenomenology, eidology.
Carl Stumpf
Povzetek
Besedilo je postumni poklon Carlu Stumpfu. Povzema poglavitne poteze Stumpfove filozofije in psihologije, tako da prikaže temeljne faze znotraj njegovega filozofskega razvoja. Besedilo spregovori o ideji fenomenologije in eidologije.
Ključne besede: Stumpf, deskriptivna psihologija, eksperimenti, fenomenologija, eidologija.
372
Leopold Blaustein
[| 33]1 The recently deceased Professor Carl Stumpf belonged to that group of philosophers who, despising any construction, love concrete research and are skeptical of the machinery of systems. Referring to a certain statement by Dilthey, Stumpf included himself among those scholars whose dream is to open paths of scientific research and to die at the end of a long life in the midst of a research journey. As it happened, Stumpf was granted his wish by benevolent fate. After all, he lived to old age, and only a few years ago was rushing to the lecture hall of the University of Berlin, a youthful spring in his step, despite the fact that already in 1921 he had reached retirement age.
Born on April 21, 1848, he was mainly interested in music, and only reluctantly devoted himself to theoretical university studies. As for many other great figures of philosophy at the turn of the two centuries, for Stumpf, a meeting with the Socrates of our time, Franz Brentano, triggered a revolution in his views and way of life. However, the work of the young scholar was also influenced by Lotze and the physicist Wilhelm Weber. In 1870, he obtained his habilitation degree in Göttingen, and three years later he took the chair in Würzburg. In 1875, he started working on his Tonpsychologie and thus entered 373 the field, in which previously divergent musical and scientific interests were harmoniously combined. He was, as he put it, an "outsider" at that time. An exception among German philosophers, he did not write any textbooks or other compendia, fleeing as often as possible from his desk to the laboratory. After all, he wanted to be a "specialist" like the representatives of other sciences, and not the architect of a new philosophical system with potentially original theories or at least original terminology. It should be noted, however, that as a university lecturer in Würzburg he took into account all disciplines of philosophy, and he
1 [This translation indicates original pagination directly in the text in square brackets; all page numbers refer to: Blaustein, Leopold. 1937/38. "Karl Stumpf." Polskie Archiwum Psychologii 10 (1-4): 33-34.]
This translation is a result of the project supported by the National Science Center, Poland (SONATA BIS, project no. 2021/42/E/HS1/00108): The Philosophy of Leopold Blaustein in Context: Brentano, Gestalt Psychology, Lvov-Warsaw School and Early Phenomenology.
Phainomena 34 | 134-135 | 2025
did the same in Prague, Halle, Munich, and Berlin, where he was appointed. In Berlin, he finally found his permanent field of activity, setting up a well-equipped Psychological Institute. While strongly supporting the development of experimental psychology, he also cared for the philosophical education of his students; in the spirit of Brentano, in particular, he did not consider conducting experiments to be the silver bullet of psychology. In Berlin, apart from acoustic work, he was involved, among other things, in child psychology, talented children, and the explanation of the "clever Hans" scandal, which initiated animal psychology in the form that would be continued on a large scale by W[olfgang] Köhler, Stumpf's student.
In his work, Stumpf focuses on metaphysics, theory of cognition, ethics, aesthetics, logic, philosophy of nature and [philosophy of] the humanities, music theory, and history of philosophy, [| 34] albeit mainly psychology and phenomenology. He considers phenomenology to be the science of sensory phenomena, and psychology as dealing with psychic functions. He differentiates between these functions and their products, which are 374 examined in the so-called "eidology." He was enthusiastic about "microscopic" psychology, i.e., analysis of elementary psychologic structures; he was against James's-Lange's theory of feelings, and against introducing to psychology the concept of unconscious psychologic functions; he welcomed Gestalt psychology developed by his students. Thanks to the wealth of his serious and fruitful research endeavors, he was at the forefront of the development of the twentieth-century psychology.
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