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ABSTRACT:
The thesis specifies how Franz Brentano inspired some of his students and how those students, in their turn, influenced the next generation of psychologists. After outlining the essentials of Aristotle's psychology, the thesis explains some general positions that Brentano
borrowed from Aristotle. It goes on to relate Brentano's concepts of 'presentation,' 'unity of consciousness,' and 'difference between the mental and physical,' as well as his call for a 'science of the mind' to ideas of Christian von Ehrenfels, Car1 Stumpf and Alexius Meinong.
Ehrenfels thought that a mental element, which he named gestalt quality, explains why a string of presentations has a certain form. The thesis then looks at a book of Edgar Rubin, even though Rubin was not a student of Brentano. His experiments that demonstrated the figure-ground phenomenon, however, were well known to the Berlin gestalt school. My analysis of Ehrenfels also sheds light on Rubin's theory, a theory that the Berlin gestalt school seemed to have overlooked, perhaps because Rubin's findings fit so we1I into their own notions.
Stumpf developed his theory of how presentations from a unity partly in rejection of Aristotle's notion of substance. His theory grounds his criticism of associationism.
Stumpf's students, however, would not accept his dualistic view, but they would benefit from the experimental methods that he developed and taught them. Stumpf adapted his theory in response to his students' work, and that version formed the basis of his objections against their explanations.
Meinong's theory of how presentations are united was inspired by the Scholastics, and his students would render it into a psychological format. It is as a review of that latter work that the Berlin gestalt school presented its gestalt notion for the first time in mature form.
The conclusion very briefly reiterates Brentano's influence. It also contains some general observations regarding the diversity among the gestalt notions, the wide scope of the gestalt authors, and their zeal for the pursuit of pure scientific knowledge.
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