Carl Stumpf

Carl Stumpf (born April 21, 1848, Wiesentheid, Lower Franconia, Bavaria [Germany]—died Dec. 25, 1936, Berlin) was a German philosopher and theoretical psychologist noted for his research on the psychology of music and tone.

Stumpf was influenced at the University of Würzburg by the philosopher Franz Brentano, founder of act psychology, or intentionalism. Appointed lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Göttingen in 1870, he wrote his first important work, Über den psychologischen Ursprung des Raumvorstellung (“The Psychological Origins of Space Perception”) three years later and soon thereafter was appointed professor at the University of Würzburg. In 1875 he began experiments for his Tonpsychologie, 2 vol. (1883–90; “Tone Psychology”), completed in the course of professorships at the Universities of Prague (1879), Halle (1884), and Munich (1889). This work was important not only for reporting the results of his experiments but also for revising concepts of psychophysics, which attempts to make quantitative measurements of physical stimuli and the sensations they produce.

In 1894 Stumpf entered the most influential phase of his career as professor of philosophy and director of the institute of experimental psychology at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin. Continuing his research on tone psychology, he founded the journal Beiträge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft (“Contributions to Acoustics and Musicology”) in 1898 and in 1900 established an archive of primitive music. He was also a cofounder of the Berlin society for child psychology (1900). In two important papers of 1907 he stressed that the experimental study of sensory and imaginal experience (e.g., images, sounds, colours) is antecedent to the study of mental functions (e.g., perceiving, willing, desiring). Thus he drew into psychology his own version of phenomenology, the philosophy that concentrates on the examination of conscious phenomena. Until Stumpf’s retirement from Berlin in 1921 his institute had numerous students who later developed an experimental phenomenology.