Wolfgang Köhler

Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

During the Nazi regime in Germany, he protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors from universities, as well as the requirement that professors give a Nazi salute at the beginning of their classes. In 1935 he left the country for the United States, where Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offered him a professorship. He taught with its faculty for 20 years, and did continuing research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Köhler as the 50th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Köhler was born in the port city of Reval (now Tallinn), Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire. His family was ethnic German, and shortly after his birth, they moved to Germany. Raised in a family including teachers, nurses and other scholars, he developed lifelong interests in the sciences as well as the arts, and especially in music.

In the course of his university education, Köhler studied at the University of Tübingen (1905–06), the University of Bonn (1906–07) and the University of Berlin (1907–09). While a student at the latter, he focused on the link between physics and psychology, in the course of which he studied with two leading scholars in those fields, Max Planck and Carl Stumpf, respectively. When completing his Ph.D., for which his dissertation addressed certain aspects of psychoacoustics, Köhler had Stumpf as his major professor and advisor.

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