"An Emerging Science of Which I Am Aware Can Fail When Faced with the Question of Whether the Time to do it has Already Arrived". The Publication of Wundt's Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie in 1874.

Abstract

The first edition of the Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie of Wilhelm Wundt which celebrated its 150th anniversary of publication. The Grundzüge was a constantly updated work that from 1874 to 1911 had 6 editions which laid the philosophical and methodological foundations of Wundt's project of psychology. The first edition of 1874 is maybe the most celebrated and remembered but the least studied and subject to a great deal of misinterpretation due to the few translations and the intrinsic complexity of the book. To understand what differentiated the Grundzüge from the other published works on physiological psychology that had been published ten years earlier, it was studied how it was received by its first readers and in general an intellectual context that made the appearance of works like Wundt's conducive. Most of the reviews affirmed that the originality of Wundt's work consisted in providing a philosophical solution to physiology that had definitively abandoned the doctrine of specific energies, which had been used to explain the origin of sensations. In this sense, the philosophers' reviews of Wundt's work were complimentary and saw in it a possibility of giving scientific treatment to certain questions that had previously been dealt with by philosophy. On the other hand, many physiologists regarded the Grundzüge as a transitional work that would be overcome when anatomy and physiology provided definitive answers. The Grunzüge was also a "publishing success" that inaugurated a successful relationship between Wundt and his publisher Wilhelm Engelmann that continued until the beginning of the twentieth century. This article aimed to reconstruct the genesis of the book by analyzing published works immediately prior to its writing that dealt, for example, with research in electrophysiology where he referred to the Gründzüge as a work in progress and that would help to answer many of the unsolved problems.