Oswald Külpe

Oswald Külpe (1862 to 1915) was a German psychologist born in Kandau in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire, and one of the leading figures of structural psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He took his doctorate in 1887 as a student and assistant of Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig, though his own ideas later diverged from his mentor's. In 1894 he became professor at the University of Würzburg, where in 1896 he founded a psychological laboratory that grew into the most outstanding institute of psychology in Germany apart from Leipzig. He later built institutes at Bonn and Munich, which led a contemporary to call him the second founder of experimental psychology on German soil. His research on systematic experimental introspection, imageless thought and mental sets influenced students such as Max Wertheimer, Narziss Ach and Henry J. Watt.