Wolfgang Köhler

Wolfgang Köhler (1887 to 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist, born in Reval (now Tallinn) to an ethnic German family that moved to Germany soon afterwards. He studied at Tübingen, Bonn and Berlin, where he took his doctorate in 1909 under Carl Stumpf with a thesis on psychoacoustics. With Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka he helped found Gestalt psychology, and his book The Mentality of Apes reported experiments in which chimpanzees on Tenerife solved problems by stacking crates and joining sticks. He protested against the dismissal of Jewish professors under the Nazi regime, left Germany in 1935 and taught at Swarthmore College for twenty years.