Philosophical and Methodological Aspects of the Origin of Experimental Psychology of Thinking and Reflexion (To the 160th Anniversary of O. Kulpe and the 125th Anniversary of His Wurzburg School)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the scientific creativity of V. Wundt's student, the organizer of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Würzburg, Oswald Kulpe (1862–1915). He is a prominent German psychologist, philosopher, logician, aesthetician, one of the creators of the epistemology of critical realism, methods of experimental aesthetics and psychology of thinking, understanding, reflection, the head of the Würzburg school, from which the leaders of Gestaltism emerged (K. Buhler, M. Wertheimer, V. Koehler, K. Koffka). Since it is necessary to state the fact of underestimation of O. Kulpe’s achievements by historians of psychology, the aim is an interdisciplinary comprehensive study of O. Kulpe’s versatile creativity as an original philosopher-psychologist of the early twentieth century. The professional development of his creative personality and creative heritage is studied by us using interdisciplinary methods of historical-scientific, subject-thematic, system-scientific analysis from the standpoint of the author's institutional-personological approach to scientific creativity. The research activity of O. Kulpe as the founder of the experimental psychology of discursive thinking and reflection is studied. The innovative achievements of the Würzburg School created by him in identifying the psychological specifics of thinking through the objectification of self-observation are characterized. The content and evaluation of O. Kulpe’s philosophical and psychological activity are discussed, and its paradigmatic role in the logic of the devlopment of the psychology of thinking of the twentieth century and its strategic importance for the modern study of cognitive processes by qualitative methods in the perspective of the XXI century are shown. The connection with the classical heritage of O. Kulpe and the Wurzburg school of the main directions of both foreign human knowledge of the twentieth century and modern Russian psychology of thinking and reflection is reflected.