Abstract
This paper charts the discourse on psychological experiments and experimental psychology as it developed in Wolffian writings in early- and mid-eighteenth-century Germany. Rather than delineating the development of a unified field of thought, the paper argues that there was a plethora of disparate, often overlapping and confused, attempts to make the soul an object of measurement and experimentation. Underlying and driving these attempts were sometimes radically different intellectual traditions, practices, and epistemic techniques. At the core of the paper is a critique of and a warning against anachronistic attempts to present a linear disciplinary history of the development of modern experimental psychology. A desire to legitimate the present at the expense of the past risks making us blind to—and unable to learn from—the genuine otherness of historically specific contexts.
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Notes
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All translations are my own unless modern English translations are cited, alone or in addition to the original sources (which is the case here). In cases where modern English translations have been used, these have been checked against the originals.
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Despite this difference and the fact that I have not been able to establish any referentiality between the works, Körber’s choice of topics and cases sometimes makes one wonder if he did not draw directly on Krüger’s physiology.
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Rydberg, A. (2021). Wolff and the Beginnings of Experimental Psychology in the Eighteenth Century. In: Araujo, S.d.F., Pereira, T.C.R., Sturm, T. (eds) The Force of an Idea. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74435-9_14
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