The whole is something else than the sum of its parts.
Psychologists
Wolfgang Köhler
German-American psychologist and a founder of Gestalt psychology (1887-1967). From 1913 to 1917 on Tenerife he showed that chimpanzees solve problems by insight rather than by trial and error, a turning point for the psychology of thinking. As director of the Berlin Psychological Institute he led the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology for fifteen years until 1935. Under Nazi rule in 1933 he openly attacked the regime in the last legally published anti-Nazi article and ultimately emigrated to the United States in 1935, teaching at Swarthmore College for twenty years and serving as president of the American Psychological Association in 1956.
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Wolfgang Köhler's Other Quotes
The chimpanzees, when they have grasped the solution, proceed to carry it out in a way which is unwaveringly purposeful.
The structure of their brains is more closely related to the chemistry of the human body and brain-structure than to the chemical nature of the lower apes.
Now is the time to ask whether we have any right to apply our standard of value as a measure of what is valuable in the lives of others.
We who have lived in the universities of Germany owe it to our science and to ourselves to refuse to teach where the freedom of teaching has been destroyed.
Related Quotes
The true is the whole.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.
-- Solomon Asch
To know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure.
-- Solomon Asch