KÜLPE, OSWALD. - Psychologist and philosopher, b. at Candau on 3 Aug. 1862, d. at Munich on 30 Dec. 1915. After having been an assistant to W. Wundt (1887-94), he was a professor at Würzburg (1894), then at Bonn (1909), and finally at Munich (1913). K. was able to react both against the naturalistic tendency that then dominated experimental psychology and against the idealistic school.
His contribution to experimental psychology was fundamental. Although a pupil of Wundt, he broke away sharply from the latter's idea (who considered introspection totally fallacious). K. no longer treated experimental psychology as a simple chapter of the natural sciences and devoted himself to the study of the subjective world, founding in 1893 the Würzburg school (which was also called the Paris school). He devised systematic introspection ("provoked introspection"); he maintained that introspection is the means of knowing what takes place in the inner life, and indeed he exaggerated by regarding it as the only means of studying psychological processes. He examined the process of abstraction and had recourse to the associative method (of G. E. Müller) in order to study judgment. For K., intelligence is not merely a process of "associating" and "dissociating" sensations, and one must admit the existence of a faculty capable of abstracting and of recognizing formal identity. He held, against Kant, that metaphysics is not only possible but necessary.
Among the philosophical problems most discussed by K. is the problem of reality; he devotes his most important work to it (Die Realisierung, I, 1912; II and III published posthumously by A. Messer, 1920). Having criticized and rejected conscientism (which reduces reality to a mere object of consciousness), K. examines various arguments in favor of realism and divides them into empirical, rational and mixed arguments, recognizing validity only in the latter. With regard to the religious problem, he was by no means hostile to theism, but he could not see a clear demonstrability of the existence of God, and he regarded religion as a "completion of the mentality."
Other principal works: Grundriss der Psychologie (Leipzig 1893); Einleitung in die Philos. (ibid. 1895; 9th ed. 1919); Die Philosophie der Gegenwart (7th ed., ibid. 1920); J. Kant (3rd ed., ibid. 1921); Erkenntnistheorie u. Naturwissenschaft (ibid. 1910); Psychologie u. Medizin (ibid. 1912); Die Ethik u. der Krieg (ibid. 1915); Vorlesungen über Psychologie (ibid. 1920, published by K. Bühler); Grundlagen der Aesthetik (published by S. Behn, ibid. 1921).
K.'s varied activity opens to science the experimental study of the psychology of thought (Denkpsychologie) and gives rise to the "neorealistic" current.
Bibliography3 works
Michelangelo Alessandri