Franz Boas - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Franz Uri Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia. Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society. Boas’s parents were educated, well-to-do, and liberal; they did not like dogma of any kind. Due to this, Boas was granted the independence to think for himself and pursue his own interests. Early in life he displayed a penchant for both nature and natural sciences. Boas vocally opposed anti-Semitism and refused to convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew; indeed, according to his biographer, "He was an 'ethnic' German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America." In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote:

The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force. My father, liberal, but not active in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public matters; the founder about 1854 of the kindergarten in my home town, devoted to science. My parents had broken through the shackles of dogma. My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom.

From kindergarten on, Boas was educated in natural history, a subject he enjoyed. In gymnasium, he was proudest of his research on the geographic distribution of plants. Nevertheless, when it came time for university, he intended to study physics in Berlin, but eventually changed his mind and enrolled in the University at Kiel to be closer to his family. But prior to that, he attended the university of Heidelberg for a time.

For his dissertation, Boas planned to conduct research on Gauss' law of the normal distribution of errors, but his thesis supervisor Gustav Karsten instructed him to work on the optical properties of water instead. Boas received his doctorate in physics from Kiel university in 1881. Unhappy with his dissertation, Boas was intrigued by the problems of perception that had plagued his research. Boas had been interested in Kantian philosophy since taking a course on aesthetics with Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg. This interest led Boas to Psychophysics; he considered moving to Berlin to study with Hermann von Helmholtz, but he had no training in Psychology.