Carl Stumpf - Academic Career

Academic Career

Upon return from seminary, Stumpf was granted a position as an instructor at the University of Göttingen in the Department of Philosophy. There Stumpf met Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner, and served as an observer in their psychological experiments. Their careful approach to a problem of aesthetics, specifically the visual appeal of rectangles of different proportions, appealed to Stumpf and reinforced the notion learned from Brentano that psychological acts or functions can be studied empirically.

In 1873, Stumpf returned to the University of Würzburg as a professor in the Department of Philosophy. Although he was forced to teach all of the philosophy and psychology courses due to Brentano's forced departure from the university, Stumpf completed his first major psychological work, an examination of visual perception, particularly depth perception. He proposed a nativist explanation for depth perception, and his book has been cited as an outstanding early contribution to the debate between the nativist and empiricist views of perception.

In 1894, Stumpf was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. At Berlin, he also held an adjunct appointment as director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Berlin. The Institute originally occupied three dark rooms, but by 1920, had moved to twenty-five rooms in the former Imperial Palace. In 1896, Stumpf presided over the Third International Congress of Psychology, and delivered the inaugural address on the relation between mind and body; he advocated an interactionalist position that opposed the popular notion of psychophysical parallelism. Finally, from 1907 to 1908, Stump served as the rector of the University of Berlin.