Prussian Academy Research Articles

Hegel’s Answer to the ‘Academy’ Question: Is it Permissible to Deceive a People?

Abstract In 1780 Frederick II pushed the Prussian Academy to put forward a controversial question for a public essay contest: “Is it useful for the people to be deceived, be it by leading it into new errors or by confirming it in those which it upholds?” Although Hegel would have been too young to participate in the contest, he took two later opportunities to provide what would have been his answer. Whereas the Phenomenology of Spirit evaluates Enlightenment’s charge that religious faith is based on deception, the Philosophy of Right suggests that public opinion formation tends to lead to collective self-deception. In both versions of his answer, however, Hegel argues that it is impossible to deceive a people about its essence. In this paper I clarify what Hegel means by a people’s essence and why he thinks it impossible to deceive a people about it.

The Term “Art” As a New Aesthetic Discourse in European and Georgian Philosophical Thinking of the Early 19th Century

In Georgian reality, the term “art”, can be found in a new, purely aesthetic sense, in terms of “artistic creation” – in the translation (1815) of Jean-Pierre Frédéric Ansillion’s (1767-1837) work “Aesthetic Judgments”, a French philosopher, member of the Prussian Academy, by David Bagrationi (1767-1819). As we know, the term “art” (Greek “techne”) has been historically interpreted in various ways. The term referred to practices established in the society, nature, individual creativity or crafts, as well as religious and mystical rituals. It shows a resemblance to the concepts such as “art – scientio – исскуство – art”. This term is especially noteworthy for the history of Georgian theoretical-literary and aesthetic thinking, however, a kind of substitute existed in our writing. It was “Facial expression”. As for the term “aesthetics” (the etymology of which is related to sensitivity, sensual perception of events), this term was introduced since 1750 by the German scientist Baumgarten in the meaning of the doctrine about “beauty” and the Georgian society got familiar with it with through the translation of Ansillion’s work “Aesthetic Judgments” translated by David Bagrationi. It should also be noted that this work was the first aesthetic work to be translated into Georgian. This fact, in turn, is of the utmost importance. According to Georgian translation of Ansillion’s work “Aesthetic Judgments” proves once again that development of Georgian philosophical-aesthetic thinking in the 18th and 19th century proceeds with a creative approach to the philosophical heritage of the past, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has its equivalent in European philosophy.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, V, 12: Briefwechsel 1811–1813 (Briefe 3561–3930). Edited by Simon Gerber and Sarah Schmidt

This further publication within the critical edition of Schleiermacher’s works offers us nearly 150 of his letters within a correspondence logging 370 letters sent and received in the two years from January 1811 through to June 1813, plus a few stray recent discoveries from 1808 to 1810 which top up material in earlier volumes (V, 10 and V, 11). This was an especially busy period in Schleiermacher’s life. His various responsibilities and roles alone take up half a page to list in the introduction (p. xxx-viii). These included being the first Professor of Theology in the University in Berlin, a year-long stint as Dean of the Theology Faculty, and member of the philosophy section of the Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1810, as well as having a role in the Education Department of the Prussian Government, not to mention his pastorate at Berlin’s Trinity Church, taken up in 1809. It is not surprising that he got by (or needed to get by) on four hours’ sleep a night and had regular periods of stomach cramp, including a seven-month bout during 1811, much commented on both by Schleiermacher himself and his correspondents.

Karl Holl: Leben—Werk—Briefe ed. by Heinrich Assel

Reviewed by: Karl Holl: Leben—Werk—Briefe ed. by Heinrich Assel H. George Anderson Karl Holl: Leben—Werk—Briefe. Edited by Heinrich Assel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. 499 pp. Soon after he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Adolf Harnack (1851–1930) proposed an ambitious project: a critical edition of the early church fathers. Harnack recognized that this task "required iron diligence, thorough philological knowledge, virtuosity in reading Greek manuscripts, and great literacy in the area of Greek theology." One of the first projects to be undertaken was the editing of some five hundred fragments of the Sacra Parallela of John of Damascus. Harnack estimated that "Hardly any other task in the area of . . . early church literature . . . is so difficult" (155). His nominee for research on this project was 33-year-old Karl Holl (1866–1926). [End Page 221] How did that potential worker bee in Harnack's scholarly hive become the father of the twentieth-century Luther Renaissance? This collection of essays from a 2016 conference provides snapshots of the process. The book is introduced in a lengthy (17–126) biographical outline by the editor, and the eighteen essays that follow highlight critical aspects of Holl's life. When Holl received the offer of a job from Harnack he was slow to accept. The research would be on Greek manuscripts. Holl had hoped to work on Latin texts and he had no experience in editing manuscripts. The challenge, however, led him into the whole field of Eastern Orthodoxy, in which he became a pathfinder. In pursuit of better knowledge of the Russian church, he taught himself Russian at the age of fifty (259–279). Holl met the enormous challenges of the project Harnack had outlined—and accomplished it in three years. His success brought him an even bigger project that would occupy him for the rest of his life: a critical edition of Epiphanius with its descriptions of eighty early church heresies (at his death, Holl still had sixteen heresies to go) (237–258). That project, in turn, brought him a professorship at the University of Berlin. In preparation for his lectures there he studied a new edition of Luther's lectures on Romans. The encounter with Luther shaped the rest of Holl's life. His essay on Luther in 1910 evoked little attention at the time, but after the experience of World War I and Germany's collapse, the public was ready for Luther's message of human need and God's promise. Holl reworked his earlier essay and published it in 1921 (365–381). Together with the second edition of Barth's Commentary on Romans, which appeared the same year, it set a new course for Protestant theology. In the years between Holl's two editions of his Luther article, Harnack continued to sponsor Holl's academic career, writing recommendations and encouraging his younger and more hesitant protege. Holl, however, began to grumble to friends about the relationship and did not hesitate to publish articles that implicitly questioned some of Harnack's sweeping generalizations about Hellenistic influences on the early church (145–174). Holl also began to drift away from Harnack's liberalism. He no longer considered Jesus' ministry as proclaiming the "infinite worth [End Page 222] of the human soul," but as God bridging the gulf to sinful humanity. That unique message, he believed, had powered the early spread of Christianity and set it apart from the syncretistic interpretations of the History of Religions School (283–313). This book is almost a biography, but it falls short in one respect. While it provides a full account of Holl's point of view through his correspondence, its comparative lack of public records, including book reviews, leaves the reader wishing for a more objective picture of the man. It does invite further research by providing the locations of Holl's letters, some lecture notes of his students, and other biographical documents. Six months before he died, Holl wrote to a friend, "Of course a lot will be written about me after I die, but what a joy it will be not to have to read it" (172). H. George Anderson Green Valley, Arizona Copyright...

Scientific Policy of Nazi Germany and Coordination of the Prussian Academy of Sciences

Scientific Policy of Nazi Germany and Coordination of the Prussian Academy of Sciences

Mit der Peitsche in den dreckigen Orient: Die Darstellung des Orients in Oskar Manns Reisebriefen

The present article deals with the travel letters of the German orientalist Oskar Mann (1867-1917). With financial support from the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Mann made two expeditions to the Ottoman Empire and Iran between 1901 and 1906 to research the Iranian languages and dialects. Travel letters and travel diaries are texts with relatively subjective value judgments, in which people and cultures are often described using ethnocentric stereotypes, because a real journey represents a cultural encounter and confrontation with the other that offers unique and invaluable information about the new world. The description of a foreign culture cannot be separated from the subjective value judgments of a traveller. This means the foreign world in which the traveller moves is represented by the subject who experiences it. According to Mann, the Orientals are people from a place that has surrendered to the West. He separates the Orient from the Occident with precise and sharp lines and divides them Eurocentrically into two separate categories. During his travels, Mann produced and imparted knowledge about the foreign cultures on the one hand, and on the other hand he spread and reinforced images and prejudices as well as stereotypes that led to the ontological differentiation between Orient and Occident. This essay tries to show that he perceived the Orient with hegemonic thought patterns and that his foreign imagination remained deeply rooted in the classic European orientalist discourse of the 19th century, and as a consequence the Orient was devalued. This study discusses the stereotypes, images and pattern of ideas that he used to represent the population of the foreign country where he travelled. 

Fluchtgepäck

Abstract Based on the expansive correspondence of the eminent philologist Eduard Berend (1883–1973), this essay reconstructs the multifaceted history of his exquisite Jean-Paul-collection, which, in 1957, became a cornerstone of the newly established Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach. Upon the invitation of the DLA, Berend, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had spent 17 years in exile in Geneva, was able to continue his work on the historical-critical edition of the works of Jean Paul (born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763–1825), one of Germany’s most prolific writers of the Classical-Romantic period. The Prussian Academy of Sciences had commissioned the critical edition in the Weimar era, and Berend had begun work on it in 1927. But, as a result of Nazi racial policy, he had been removed as the editor in 1938. The return of Berend and his Jean-Paul-Archiv mark the beginning of the DLA’s history as an exceptional research center not just for exile literature but also of and for exiled scholars.

Scholars and Literati at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (1700–1800)

This note is a summary description of the set of scholars and literati who participated in the activities of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from its inception in 1700 to the eve of the Industrial Revolution (1800).

Sur le progres des sciences

This paper investigates the Baconian roots of Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX. Sur le Progrès des Sciences (1752). The Letter was published almost a decade after Maupertuis had accepted Frederick II’s invitation to move from Paris to Berlin and become the new President of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Contrary to the secondary literature that identifies a distinction between Maupertuis’s Parisian and Berliner phases, this paper argues that there is in fact greater continuity between the two. Based on a reading that empha­sizes the programmatic and methodological commonalities between Bacon’s project in De augmentis scientiarum (1623) and Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX, this paper argues that, in a Baconian fashion, Maupertuis combines the roles of the “scientist” and the “natural philosopher” into an integrated plan of action with both intellectual an institutional aims. One of Maupertuis’s aims was to highlight the importance of observation and experiment not only in the development of natural philosophy but also for some aspects of speculative philosophy, while another of his aims was to reinvigorate the structure of the Berlin Academy and to model it the fashion of other similar European intellectual projects of that time.

Literatur-Zensur- und Gegenstrategien. Die Fälle Johannes R. Becher und Heinrich Mann in der Weimarer Republik

Starting out from H. Mann's public statements about the trials against J.R. Becher's ,,Levisite“ and Arthur Schnitzler's ,,Reigen“ Haupt interprets H. Mann's journalistic campaign against literary censorship in the Weimar Republic as well es his role in the section ,,Literary Art“ of the Prussian Academy of Arts as being the heroic illusion of a courageous man striving to enlighten the public in the face of the emergence of fascism.

Daniel Ernst Jablonskis Wirken im Geist der Reformation, des Humanismus und der Frühaufklärung | Daniel Ernst Jablonski and his Activities in the Spirit of Humanism, the Reformation, and the Early Enlightenment

He was a tutor for the Radvilas (Radziwiłłs) at Biržai, a student at Oxford, headmaster of a gymnasium in Leszno, and court preacher in Königsberg and later Berlin. Of all the stages in the life of Daniel Ernst Jablonski (1660–1741), his contribution, together with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to the establishment in 1700 of the Kurfürstlich Brandenburgische Societät der Wissenschaften, the predecessor of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, is emphasised the most. However, his efforts to achieve ecumenical communication between evangelical churches of various hues were no less significant. The article deals with the development of Jablonski’s views leading to these efforts as a result of his family history: the experiences of his childhood and youth. Manifestations of efforts in East Central Europe, especially in the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, are presented through Jablonski’s activities in pursuing ecclesiastical unity, defending the rights of religious minorities, engaging in Hebrew studies, and in the ecclesiastical controversy in Russia.

LOYAL WORKERS AND DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS: BIG HUMANITIES AND THE ETHICS OF KNOWLEDGE

Over the past two decades, long-running debates about the purposes and practices of humanistic inquiry have been refocused as a debate about the uncertain fate of the humanities in a digital age. Now, with the advent of digital and computational humanities, scholars are discussing with a new urgency what the humanities are for and what it means to practice them. And many suggest that the surfeit of digital data is unprecedented and are calling for new methods, practices, and epistemologies. This article considers these claims in light of a longer history of what Lorraine Daston has called “practices of compendia”––practices of collecting, collating, and interpreting massive amounts of data. It focuses, in particular, on the late nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen and the range of projects he initiated and led as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Mommsen invented the “big humanities” and what his contemporaries termed the “industrial” model of scholarship, a model that helped create a new, modern scholarly persona and a distinctly modern ethics of knowledge.

Lapsed into History: J. D. E. Preuß, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and the Struggle for Access to State Archives in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Berlin

The article addresses the practice of archival editing in Berlin around 1850. The archive as a contested space of knowledge, to which researchers demanded entry and which government authorities only reluctantly made accessible, provides the frame for the study. It aims to examine the strategies and arguments, with which this contest was fought out. How did archival research projects shape the roles of the project coordinators, of the researchers and of the archivists? Which role was assigned to the public in the struggle for access to state archives? The specific project, by which these questions are explored, is the thirty-volume edition of the works of Frederick the Great produced under the auspices of the Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1840 to 1856. The article first outlines the historical background of the research project, starting with a brief biography of Johann David Erdmann Preuß, a scholarly outsider who had initiated the edition. Second, the article addresses the Academy’s efforts in gaining access for Preuß to the Prussian state archives, with particular attention to the self-narratives of the various scholarly personae involved in this discussion on archival accessibility.

Kant on the motive of (imperfect) duty

This paper argues that Kantians face a little discussed problem in accounting for how actions that fulfill imperfect duties can be morally motivated. It is widely agreed that actions that are performed from the motive of duty are performed through a recognition of the objective necessity of the action. It is also generally held that the objective necessity of an action consists in its rational non-optionality. Many actions that fulfill imperfect duties, however, are rationally optional. Given these constraints, it is impossible that such rationally optional actions (including, for instance, many acts of benevolence) could be performed from the motive of duty. After presenting the problem as one that Kantians should find genuinely pressing, this paper offers a solution by advancing an alternative to the conception of rational necessity widely shared by Kantians. On the alternative view presented here, an action is rationally necessary if and only if the justifying reasons that speak in favor of performing the action do not depend on any empirical and therefore contingent motivational source on the part of an agent. Such actions may well be rationally optional. Moral motivation is therefore possible even in the case of rationally optional actions. Abbreviations: The following abbreviations are used for Kant’s works. All translations are from Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Citations are given by the abbreviation, the volume, and the page number from Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Georg Reimer, later Walter deGruyter & Co., 1900–). G.Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).KpVKritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason).MSDie Metaphysik der Sitten (The Metaphysics of Morals).

Thérèse philosophe and Dostoevsky’s Critique of Rational Egotism

<p>В статье рассматривается любопытный эпизод, характерный для периода наибольшего творческого расцвета Ф. М. Достоевского. В набросках к неосуществленному проекту, известному под названием «Житие великого грешника», писатель несколько раз упоминает «Терезу-философа» — персонажа французской философской повести (conte philosophique) XVIII века «Философия Терезы, или мемуары к истории отца Диррага и мадемуазель Эрадис» (“Thérèse philosophe, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Père Dirrag et de Mademoiselle Éradice”).</p><p>«Философия Терезы» вышла в свет анонимно в 1749 году. В статье доказывается, что ее автором был Жан-Батист де Буайе, маркиз д’Аржан (1703–1771), плодовитый автор, участник философских дискуссий своего времени, состоявший в переписке с Вольтером. В 1742 году д’Аржан поступил на службу к Фридриху II, и последующие 26 лет возглавлял Академию наук Пруссии.</p><p>Первая часть статьи посвящена детальному анализу «Философии Терезы». Хотя эта книга была широко известна в первые сто лет после ее публикации, затем она была забыта и стала библиографической редкостью. Анализ показывает, что в «Философии Терезы» высказываются идеи «разумного эгоизма» (особенно в отношениях между мужчиной и женщиной), популярные в период Просвещения во Франции.</p><p>Вторая часть статьи посвящена решительному ответу такой морали, который Достоевский дает в своих поздних романах. Автор статьи предполагает, что фривольный французский роман, вероятно, известный Достоевскому с юности, сохранял для него значение как образец такого взгляда на жизнь, с которым русский писатель был глубоко не согласен.</p>

Dissembling Orthodoxy in the Age of the Enlightenment: Frederick the Great and his Confession of Faith

The name of Friedrich II and his nearly half-century reign from 1740 to 1786 are virtually synonymous with the advent and advance of the Enlightenment in Prussia. In his famous 1784 answer to the question posed by theBerlinische Monatsschrift, “What is enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asserted that enlightenment could be partially conceptualized as a temporal epoch, one whose salient characteristics, especially in regards to religion, were manifested in the personal opinions and public policies of his royal Prussian sovereign. “We do not live in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment – the century of Friedrich.” In a similar spirit, a generation after Kant wrote, Friedrich Schleiermacher delivered a paean to Friedrich II's memory in a January 24, 1817 address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on what would have been Friedrich II's one-hundred-and-fifth birthday. Schleiermacher heralded Friedrich II as “a friend of the muses,” who doubtlessly conversed with Plato in the afterlife, the legacy of whose domestic initiatives had been to transform Prussia into a more cultured society, while his “heroic” and “glorious” victories secured for the Prussian Army its vaunted reputation for military prowess. As the 29-year-old king himself wrote in a February 24, 1741 battlefield letter from the frontlines of the First Silesian War, “I love war for its glory, but if I were not a ruler, I would be nothing but a philosopher.”

Einstein’s Non-Euclidean Line Element Theory and Quantum Mechanics Interpretation

In “The third speech on the wave mechanics” (1926), E. Schodinger pointed that the Hamilton-Maupertuis principle as a classical starting point of wave mechanics in the definition of generalized coordinate space line element, introduced the generalized non-Euclidean geometry, and finally obtained the wave equation including Laplace operator in the generalized non Euclidean geometry line element. At the 1927 meeting of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Albert Einstein read a paper entitled “Does Schodinger’s wave mechanics determines the dynamics of a system’s movement completely or only sence in statistics?”. In this paper, Einstein used the Schodinger equation to obtain a representation of the kinetic energy, and used the non-Euclidean line element of the Configuration space to define the velocity component of a single particle, and return to determinism. But Bothe pointed out that when people considered a system composed of two subsystems, the wave function of the whole system can be decomposed into two simple products of the wave function of the two subsystems, but the hidden variables are dependent on each other. Einstein be-lieved that this was not acceptable, gave up the publication of the paper on the non-European line hidden variables theory. In the long-term controversy with the Copenhagen school, Einstein was convinced that the probability interpretation of the wave function was indispensable because of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, but not the wave function probability led to the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Any attempt to seek a complete explanation of quantum mechanics is inevitable to change the current formal system of quantum mechanics.

Anneliese Maier and the Study of Medieval Philosophy Today

Anneliese Maier and the Study of Medieval Philosophy Today Dominik Perler (bio) 1 in 1936, at a time of rapid decline in German academia, the Prussian Academy of Science sent Anneliese Maier to Rome, mandating her with a research project on Leibniz letters in Italian libraries. The young historian of philosophy, who had written her dissertation on Kant’s theory of the categories, dutifully established a list with extant letters.1 But she did not become a Leibniz scholar. Nor did she continue her studies on Kant. She delved into the unexplored world of Italian manuscripts dealing with medieval philosophy and decided to spend her entire intellectual life in this world. Leaving Germany for good, she settled in Rome and worked in the Vatican Libraries, reading and writing there until she died in 1971.2 She published a monumental five-volume study of late scholastic natural philosophy (Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik, 1949–58), an equally monumental three-volume collection of essays (Ausgehendes Mittelalter, 1964–67), and other articles, text editions, and manuscript catalogues.3 Despite her extraordinary achievements, she never obtained a regular professorial position in a German or Italian university.4 Using Virginia Woolf’s famous words, one could say that she had no room of her own, at least no institutional room. What makes her work so remarkable? First of all, the choice of topics. At a time when Neo-Thomism was thriving and many scholars were concerned with problems in Thomistic metaphysics, such as the relationship between essence [End Page 173] and existence or the proofs for God’s existence, she showed no interest in these issues. She rather focused on problems in philosophy of nature: motion, change, time, causation, and the structure of material things. In fact, in one of her first publications she made clear that “in every period and every tradition it was the conception of the essence of a material substance that established the basis upon which ideas about inorganic nature and its processes were built.”5 Hence it was her aim to understand how medieval authors dealt with seemingly simple things such as sticks and stones. What was their account of the inner constitution of these things? How did they analyze their perceivable features? And how did they explain simple phenomena we observe in daily life, for instance, the fact that stones fall when we drop them? These questions may seem less exciting than those about such lofty things as God and the immaterial soul, but they are of crucial importance, as Maier unfailingly noticed, and must not be ignored. For it is precisely the explanation of simple material things that reveals a general metaphysical view of the world—a view that relies upon concepts that need to be spelled out. Maier not only provided a detailed analysis of these concepts but also pointed out that there are conflicts in the medieval view of the world. For instance, she showed that scholastic authors were struggling with two hardly compatible doctrines when explaining the inner structure of material things.6 On the one hand, they referred to four basic elements and claimed that all things, including their qualities, can be explained in terms of a mixture of elements. On the other hand, they appealed to form and matter and held, following Aristotle, that all things can be explained as hylomorphic compounds. But how are elements related to form and matter? Are elements also to be analyzed as compounds of form and matter? Why then are they basic if they consist of more basic items? In discussing these questions, scholastic authors realized that there is a tension between the materialist doctrine of elements and hylomorphism and that one cannot dissolve this tension without modifying one of the two theories or both. It was precisely their struggle with this tension that led to a transformation of traditional theories. What makes Maier’s analysis so original and still fascinating is her detailed argument that it was an internal transformation of existing theories, above all of hylomorphism, that gave rise to new ideas about the inner constitution of material things. Medieval commentators did not simply spell out the Aristotelian theory but radically changed it by...

Einstein's Berlin: in the footsteps of a genius

Lured by a top academic position sponsored by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Albert Einstein moved from Zurich to Berlin in 1914 and lived there until 1932, just weeks before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. During this fraught economic and political time, Einstein developed the general theory of relativity, gained worldwide fame, supported democratic, socialist, pacifist, and Zionist causes, and withstood the growing ire of ultranationalists. Naturally, he became entwined in a network of people and places throughout the city. With a foreword by Nobel Prize winner Walter Kohn, Einstein's Berlin combines narrative, maps, and period photographs to tell this story in the form of a sophisticated, annotated city guide, allowing readers and travelers to follow the physicist's footsteps throughout Berlin. Dieter Hoffmann conveys how Einstein's life and work were linked to the scientific and social life of the city and inspires the reader to explore the places where he made his mark.

Wolfgang Köhler's The Mentality of Apes and the animal psychology of his time.

In 1913, the Anthropoid Station for psychological and physiological research in chimpanzees and other apes was founded by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin) near La Orotava, Tenerife. Eugene Teuber, its first director, began his work at the Station with several studies of anthropoid apes' natural behavior, particularly chimpanzee body language. In late 1913, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, the second and final director of the Station, arrived in Tenerife. During his stay in the Canary Islands, Köhler conducted a series of studies on intelligent behavior in chimpanzees that would become classics in the field of comparative psychology. Those experiments were at the core of his book Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen (The Mentality of Apes), published in 1921. This paper analyzes Köhler's experiments and notions of intelligent behavior in chimpanzees, emphasizing his distinctly descriptive approach to these issues. It also makes an effort to elucidate some of the theoretical ideas underpinning Köhler's work. The ultimate goal of this paper is to assess the historical significance of Köhler's book within the context of the animal psychology of his time.