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Kurt Danziger Quotes
born 1926 Germany
Kurt Danziger (born June 3, 1926) is a German psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at York University, Toronto, whose work has focused on the history of psychology, particularly in the 20th century. His innovative contributions to this field have received widespread international recognition.
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Newtonian studies are not part of physics but belong to an altogether different discipline, the history of science.
Wundt sought to achieve was a rejuvenation of philosophical inquiry by new means, not the constitution of a completely new discipline.
The reaction time studies conducted during the first few years of Wundt’s laboratory constitute the first historical example of a coherent research program, explicitly directed toward psychological issues and involving a number of interlocking studies.
The basis for Wundt’s initial discussion of the problem of introspection is provided by his insistence on the distinction between “self-observation” (Selbstbeobachtung) and “internal perception” (innere Warhnemung).
History is not the arena in which natural scientists look for the truth; quite the contrary, they believe it cannot be found there but rather in the laboratory. From their point of view history will at best yield up stale truths that have been superseded.
Where the insider's engagement with the discipline's concepts and practices is combined with the moral distance maintained by the outsider one has reason to look for the emergence of a historiography that is both critical and effective.
Here we are more likely to come across fields that are structured in an agonistic manner, fields which are characterized by deep divisions between alternative schools of thought rather than by the achievement of a general working consensus.
In the case of psychology, of course, it is not only the concepts and methods of the discipline that undergo constant historical change, but the very subject matter itself. Human subjectivity, the reality behind the objects of psychological investigation, is itself strongly implicated in the historical process, both as agent and as product.
For such fields deep historical studies can have considerable contemporary relevance and hence fall within the boundaries of the field itself. Weber and Durkheim are still studied by sociologists, just as Adam Smith and Ricardo are still studied by economists, whereas Galilean and Newtonian studies are not part of physics but of an altogether different discipline, the history of science.
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