Philosophical theories and experimental design in vittorio Benussi

Abstract

Around twenty years after the celebrated experiments on thought conducted by the Wtirzburg School, and in particular by perhaps its most broad-minded researcher Karl Btihler, a young Viennese by the name of Popper submitted a dissertation, Zur Methodenfrage der Denkpsychologie (1928), to the University of Vienna) Prepared under the supervision of Btihler himself (now resident in the Austrian capital, where he had set up his own institute of psychology), and co-examined by the philosopher Moritz Schlick, Popper's thesis was a careful analysis of the methodological and epistemological aspects of the theoreticalexperimental approach that had created such great sensation, not only in academic science but also in the broader cultural milieu of the time (one even detects its echoes in works by Samuel Beckett). z As we shall see, no less incisive and innovative from the epistemological point of view as well were Benussi's experiments on visual and temporal perception. 3 Indeed, one discerns a number of analogies between Btihler's scientific career (1879-1963) and that of his close contemporary Benussi (18781927), who, after being one of the most eminent representatives of the Psychology Laboratory at the University of Graz (1902-1918), founded his own Institute of Psychology at Padua (1919-1927). His Institute 4 attracted a number of young researchers, of whom the most outstanding was Musatti, a mathematics student from Venice interested in philosophy and the theory of science whose first important work, Analisi del concetto di realtgt empirica (1926), addressed theoretical-empirical issues in the style of the Graz 'theory of objects.' Subsequently, as we know, Musatti's experimental research was subject to a variety of influences (especially the Gestalt theory propounded by the School of Berlin) and moved in several directions (Freudian psychoanalysis in particular), s Popper, for his part, decided to pursue his studies in theoreticalexperimental psychology no further, on the ground that the results obtained by