Carl Stumpf

Carl Stumpf (1848 to 1936) was a German philosopher, psychologist and musicologist who taught for most of his career in university philosophy departments and became one of the founders of experimental psychology in Germany. Born in Wiesentheid in Bavaria, he studied under Franz Brentano at Würzburg and took his doctorate at Göttingen under Hermann Lotze, then held posts at Göttingen, Würzburg, Prague, Munich and Halle before taking the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1894. There he also directed the Institute of Experimental Psychology and served as rector in 1907 and 1908. His Tonpsychologie examined how people perceive tones, consonance and dissonance, and he used the word phenomenology for the study of such appearances, which influenced Edmund Husserl. He is noted for founding the Berlin School of experimental psychology, and his students Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka went on to found Gestalt psychology, while Kurt Lewin built on the same circle. He also helped found comparative musicology and ethnomusicology through his study The Origins of Music, and he retired from Berlin in 1921.