Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is generally regarded as the father of experimental psychology. A glance at the opening chapter of virtually any introductory psychology textbook, which usually contains a brief history of psychology, will almost certainly refer the importance of his book Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874; English translation by E. B. Titchener, 1910) and, in particular, of the laboratory that he set up in Leipzig in 1879. The Leipzig laboratory is usually held to be the first experimental psychology laboratory and was important not only for the research that was carried out there, but for the large number of psychologists, both European and American, that trained there. For many psychologists in America, a trip to Leipzig to learn the new experimental methods was an important part of their education.

But the questions that Wundt sought to answer through these laboratory techniques cannot be fully understood in isolation from his philosophical presuppositions, and these, as Wundt himself says in the Preface to Principles of Physiological Psychology, owed much to Kant. In Chapter 6 we saw how Kant and Hume differed in how they sought to account for our experience. For Hume, experience essentially consisted of elementary sensations that were linked together through a mechanical process of association. Kant, on the other hand, believed that one could never account for the ordered nature of experience in this way. The fundamental flaw of empiricism, for Kant, was its willingness to accept sensory experience as fundamental rather than recognising that there must be even more fundamental structuring principles lying behind sensory experience for it to exist in the first place.