Kohler biography
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Wolfgang Koehler
Wolfgang Köhler was born on Friday the 21th of January in in Reval (Estonia), today’s Tallinn. Six years later, in , his family moved to Germany and he grew up in Wolfenbüttel. After studying philosophy and natural sciences in Tübingen, Bonn and Berlin from , he was awarded a doctorate in with a tone-psychological work under Carl Stumpf. Afterwards, in , he was assistant of Friedrich Schumann in Frankfurt who had followed Karl Marbe. Karl Marbe himself had taken the Külpe-professorship in Würzburg. During Köhler’s time as an assistant from till he met Kurt Koffka and worked with Max Wertheimer who examined the Phi-Phenomenon.
Due to a reference of Carl Stumpf, Wolfgang Köhler was appointed to being the director of the “Anthropoidenstation” of the Prussian academy of sciences at Tenerife in At this time he was only 27 years old and still relatively inexperienced in the field. Stumpf possibly saved Köhler’s life by appointing him to Tenerife. It might have been coin
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Wolfgang Köhler
German-American psychologist and phenomenologist
For the pianist, see Wolfgang Köhler (pianist).
Wolfgang Köhler (21 January &#;– 11 June ) 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 protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in , ranked Köhler as the 50th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1]
Early life
[edit]Köhler was born in the port city of Reval (now Tallinn), Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire. His family was ethnic German, and shortly
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Biographical Memoirs: Volume 81 ()
talists, and—out of nowhere, it seemed, just after the First World War—the remarkable Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler. Of course it did not really come out of nowhere. Its three founders were German, with intellectual roots in Husserl’s phenomenology and in Kant. They saw themselves as fighters against positivism, as humanistic scientists engaged in a life-and-death struggle against vitalism on one side and against a series of dreary mechanistic psychologies on the other. Their chief opponents were behaviorism, associationism, and classical introspective psychology; much of Köhler’s research was designed to refute the assumptions of those schools.
Wolfgang Köhler was born of German parents in Reval, Estonia, where his father was a schoolmaster; his family returned to Germany when he was six years old. He studied at several universities, receiving his Ph.D. from Ca