Carl Stumpf

Carl Stumpf (1848 to 1936) was a German philosopher, psychologist and musicologist, best known as the founder of the Berlin School of experimental psychology. He studied with Franz Brentano at Wurzburg and took his doctorate at Gottingen in 1868 under the influence of Hermann Lotze. His early work on visual space perception proposed a nativist account of depth perception, and he went on to make the psychology of tones his main subject, writing on the origins of music and helping to found comparative musicology and ethnomusicology. After teaching at Gottingen, Wurzburg, Prague, Munich and Halle he held a professorship at the University of Berlin. His students Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka were instrumental in founding Gestalt psychology, and Kurt Lewin, who also studied there, helped establish experimental social psychology in America.