Die Entwicklung des Grundkonzeptes der Psychophysik durch Gustav Theodor Fechner—eine spezielle Lösungsvariante des philosophisch tradierten Leib-Seele-Problems?

„Wenn man nicht wüßte, daß wirklich Fechner allein und oft unter erschwerenden äußeren Umständen alles das vollbracht hat, man könnte meinen, daß sich hinter dem einen Namen eine ganze Gesellschaft von Gelehrten verberge.” Wilhelm Wundt [1]

Summary

Gustav Theodor Fechner was one of the outstanding German scientists and thinkers. He is well known as eminent founder of a new science “Psychophysics”—the quantitative study of the relations between physical stimuli and sensations. But it seems that first idea and first solutions of this new science are not the result of hard experimental work but rather of metaphysical speculations. So we found for the first time the important “Fundamentalformel” in thephilosophical book “Zend-Avesta”, written by Fechner already in 1851. Therefore this formula may not be the result of hislater experimental efforts, put down in writing in the important “Elemente der Psychophysik” (1860). In the present paper it was intended to retrace the so called “indefinite train of thoughts” (Fechner) that leaded him to his strictly mathematical formula.