Georgy Chelpanov

Georgy Ivanovich Chelpanov (1862 to 1936) was a Russian Imperial and Soviet psychologist, philosopher and logician. Born in Mariupol to an upper-class family of Greek origin, he studied in Odessa, taught at Moscow and Kyiv, and from 1907 held a chair of philosophy at Moscow University. In 1914 he opened the Psychological Institute there, named after his wife. His own psychological research drew on Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Stumpf, and he distinguished experimental psychology, empirical psychology and theoretical psychology as separate levels of knowledge, while arguing that mental and physical processes are independent of one another. He ran experiments on the perception of space and time and described laboratory methods in Introduction to Experimental Psychology (1915). From the mid 1920s, as Marxist psychology took hold, his methods were dismissed as idealist and he resigned as director of the institute.