Wolfgang Köhler, psychologist

Wolfgang Köhler (21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German and American psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.
The international scientific community honored Wolfgang Köhler in these ways not only for his wide-ranging theoretical and empirical contributions but also for his courage and his character. As the holder of one of Germany's most distinguished professorial chairs in the 1930s he could easily have collaborated with Hitler as so many others did.
Publicly rejecting that course, he spoke out against the brutal Nazis for as long as it was possible to do so. Then, here in the United States, Köhler resumed his productive research career and continued to make new contributions to science in his adopted country.
A genuinely creative thinker as well as a person of great dignity and honor, a physicist and philosopher as well as a psychologist, a cultured citizen of a war-torn world, Wolfgang Köhler showed us by his own personal example what it can mean to be a scientist.
Read more