page_title: Wilhelm Wundt
section_title: Wundt's excellence
hierarchical_section_title: Wilhelm Wundt / Wundt's excellence
caption_attribution_description: English: Wilhelm Wundt Southwest University Chongqing, China
context_page_description: Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founders of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien, set up to publish the Institute's research.
  A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked Wundt's reputation as first for "all-time eminence" based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third.
context_section_description: Wundt developed the first comprehensive and uniform theory of the science of psychology. The special epistemological and methodological status of psychology is postulated in this wide-ranging conceptualization, characterized by his neurophysiological, psychological and philosophical work. The human as a thinking and motivated subject is not to be captured in the terms of the natural sciences. Psychology requires special categories and autonomous epistemological principles. It is, on the one hand, an empirical humanity but should not, on the other hand, ignore its physiological basis and philosophical assumptions. Thus a varied, multi-method approach is necessary: self-observation, experimentation, generic comparison and interpretation. Wundt demanded the ability and readiness to distinguish between perspectives and reference systems, and to understand the necessary supplementation of these reference systems in changes of perspective. He defined the field of psychology very widely and as interdisciplinary, and also explained just how indispensable is the epistemological-philosophical criticism of psychological theories and their philosophical prerequisites. Psychology should remain connected with philosophy in order to promote this critique of knowledge of the metaphysical presuppositions so widespread among psychologists.
  The conceptual relationships within the complete works created over decades and continuously reworked have hardly been systematically investigated. The most important theoretical basis is the empirical-psychological theory of apperception, based on Leibniz's philosophical position, that Wundt, on the one hand, based on experimental psychology and his neuropsychological modelling and, on the other hand, extrapolated into a development theory for culture. The fundamental reconstruction of Wundt's main ideas is a task that cannot be achieved by any one person today due to the complexity of the complete works. He tried to connect the fundamental controversies of the research directions epistemologically and methodologically by means of a co-ordinated concept – in a confident handling of the categorically basically different ways of considering the interrelations. Here, during the founding phase of university psychology, he already argued for a highly demanding meta-science meta-scientific reflection – and this potential to stimulate interdisciplinarity und perspectivism (complementary approaches) has by no means been exhausted.
caption: Wilhelm Wundt 
   Southwest University Chongqing, China
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1916", "Image ImageLength": "3825", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS Kiss X2", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "PaintShop Pro 18,00", "Image DateTime": "2018:07:22 12:09:54", "Image Artist": "Picasa", "Image YCbCrSubSampling": "2", "Image IPTC/NAA": "[28, 2, 55, 0, 8, 50, 48, 49, 56, 48, 55, 48, 53]", "Image ExifOffset": "290", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1206", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3788", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "28/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Portrait Mode", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2018:07:05 15:14:36", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2018:07:05 15:14:36", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "6", "EXIF ApertureValue": "5", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash fired, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "92", "EXIF SubSecTime": "04", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "04", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "04", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1619", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3636", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "1916", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "3825", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "1070", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "2136000/439", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "356000/73", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "76092a5a8799e14aedda2fcd00474a33"}