Eduard Spranger

Eduard Spranger (1882 to 1963) was a German philosopher and psychologist, born in Berlin, who died in Tübingen. A student of Wilhelm Dilthey, he was considered a humanist who developed a philosophical pedagogy as an act of self defense against the experimental psychology of his day. His book Lebensformen, translated as Types of Men, sold 28,000 copies by the end of 1920. In it he argued that types of human life are structures in consciousness, that personality types have a basis in biology but cannot be fully explained by it, and that the mind must be understood as a whole. He described personalities in terms of six value orientations: theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political and religious. He criticized psychologists who reduced the psyche and society to abstract elements of science. One of his doctoral students was the Indian educator Syed Abid Husain.