Research Paper On William Wundt

Gifted the term, father of psychology, William Wundt left his mark on psychology even still today. Having opened the first Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1879, he trained 186 graduate students to continue on his legacy. William Wundt set himself apart from his philosopher peers by separating the psychological aspect of the mind away from philosophy by analyzing the workings of the mind in a more structured way. Wundt took to measuring consciousness objectively with control, a method that has not yet been executed at the time. Wundt did not find all this success alone. Friedrich Bessel was a German astronomer and philosopher very interested on how outside factors impact accurate data. His experiments

Empiricist philosophers were not only concerned on the fundamental importance of observable mental life, but also used words such as “sensations,” “impressions,” and “ideas.” Although the basics of empiricism hold strong in Wundt, he discredits quite a few of the previous empiricists definitions. Wundt disagreed with Locke and Hume on the fact that the mind should be viewed as a metaphysical entity consistent with old, Platonic conceptions. He also opposed Kant’s view of simply studying only inner experience primarily through self-reflective introspection. Wundt believed the inner and outer experience is arbitrary considering both are from the same subject. In response to discrediting these two definitions, Wundt develops the “science of immediate experience.” This is a science that interprets our experience, as it is immediately present to us, without trying to remove our self from that experience. For example, immediate experience would be seeing the greenness of green paper. Wundt involved the mediate experience to measure the physicality of such green paper. How green is the greenness of that green paper? The science of immediate experience involves the use of perception to determine that the paper is green. One step past perception is apperception. Wundt believed that apperception combines sensory experiences with pre-existing experiences to develop into a new feeling or experience. Apperception plays with the prior knowledge already stored in the