School
Gestalt psychology
Overview
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology, and a theory of perception, that emphasizes psychologically processing entire patterns (and "configurations"), not merely individual components of situations or events separately. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Germany and Austria as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
Gestalt psychology is often associated with the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. In Gestalt theory, information is perceived as wholes rather than disparate parts which are then processed summatively. As used in Gestalt psychology, the German word Gestalt ( gə-SHTA(H)LT; German: [ɡəˈʃtalt] ; meaning "form") is interpreted as "pattern" or "configuration".
It differs from Gestalt therapy, which is only peripherally linked to Gestalt psychology.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Hence, in the conclusion of a syllogism we restrict a predicate to a certain object, after having thought it in the major in its whole extent under a certain condition. This complete quantity of the extent in relation to such a condition is called universality (universalitas). To this corresponds totality (universitas) of conditions in the synthesis of intuitions. The transcendental conception of reason is therefore…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Gestalt psychology is; the author is tied to Gestalt psychology in the knowledge graph.
The thought is as a whole in our consciousness, and at first only works upon the apperception by means of the resulting total feeling, and then develops into its separate component parts by successive acts of apperception. In exactly the same way the artist, the poet, or the composer is accustomed to grasp the whole of the work of art in its outlines, sometimes very indistinct, before he begins to carry out any of…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
The author is tied to Gestalt psychology in the knowledge graph.
All _hypotyposis_ (presentation, _subjectio sub adspectum_), or sensible illustration, is twofold. It is either _schematical_, when to a concept comprehended by the Understanding the corresponding intuition is given _a priori_; or it is _symbolical_.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
The author is tied to Gestalt psychology in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Gestalt psychology
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Max Horkheimer
- Marshall McLuhan
- Alexius Meinong
- Carl Stumpf
- Christian von Ehrenfels
- George Stout
- Wataru Hiromatsu
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Reification (fallacy)
- Germany
- Immanuel Kant
- Problem solving
- Correlation
- David Hartley (philosopher)
- Geometry
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Cybernetics
- Psychology
- Trial and error
- Perception
- Sense data
- Structuralism (psychology)
- Austria
- Psychophysical parallelism
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Emergence
- Human brain
- School of Brentano
- Carl Stumpf
- Edward B. Titchener
- Ivan Pavlov
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.