Johann Friedrich Herbart

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776 to 1841) is known today mainly as a founding figure of modern psychology and educational theory, though these were parts of a larger philosophical project through which his contemporaries saw him as a philosopher of the first rank. Born in Oldenburg on 4 May 1776, he wrote on Wolff and Kant while still in his early teens, became the second successor to Kant's chair at Konigsberg in 1809, and returned to Gottingen in 1833, where he died in 1841. He watched the triumph of German Idealism and Romanticism with despair and wrote polemics against it. His mathematization of the mind proved a dead end but encouraged early experimentalists such as Fechner; his arguments against psychological faculties were taken over by Wundt, and his notions of the limen and the subconscious were fundamental to Freud. In philosophy he anticipated ideas of Brentano.