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WILHELM WUNDT

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (German: 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist

• Born : 16 August 1832
  Neckarau near Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Confederation
• Died : 31 August 1920 (aged 88) Saxony, Germany
• Education : University of Leipzig
• Known for : Experimental psychology
  Cultural psychology
  Apperception

He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study.

He also established the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien (from 1883 to 1903), followed by Psychologische Studien (from 1905 to 1917), 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. Wundt grew up during a period in which the reinvestment of wealth into educational, medical and technological development was commonplace.

In 1867, near Heidelberg, Wundt met Sophie Mau (1844–1912)They married on 14 August 1872 in Kiel.The couple had three children: Eleanor (1876–1957), who became an assistant to her father in many ways, Louise, called Lilli, (1880–1884) and de: Max Wundt (1879–1963), who became a philosophy professor.

In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt opened the first laboratory ever to be exclusively devoted to psychological studies, and this event marked the official birth of psychology as an independent field of study. The new lab was full of graduate students carrying out research on topics assigned by Wundt, and it soon attracted young scholars from all over the world who were eager to learn about the new science that Wundt had developed.

The University of Leipzig assigned Wundt a lab in 1876 to store equipment he had brought from Zurich. Located in the Konvikt building, many of Wundt’s demonstrations took place in this laboratory due to the inconvenience of transporting his equipment between the lab and his classroom. Wundt arranged for the construction of suitable instruments and collected many pieces of equipment such as tachistoscopes, chronoscopes, pendulums, electrical devices, timers, and sensory mapping devices, and was known to assign an instrument to various graduate students with the task of developing uses for future research in experimentation. Between 1885 and 1909, there were 15 assistants.

Wundt was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leipzig and Göttingen, and the Pour le Mérite for Science and Arts. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Wundt was an honorary member of 12 scientific organizations or societies. He was a corresponding member of 13 academies in Germany and abroad. For example, he was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1895 and of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1909.

Wundt retired in 1917 to devote himself to his scientific writing.According to Wirth (1920), over the summer of 1920, Wundt "felt his vitality waning ... and soon after his eighty-eighth birthday, he died ... a gentle death on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 3" Wundt is buried in Leipzig’s South Cemetery with his wife, Sophie, and their daughters, Lilli and Eleanor.