Otto Selz
Otto Selz ( born February 14, 1881 in Munich, † August 27, 1943 in Auschwitz ) was a German philosopher and psychologist.
Life
Selz studied law 1899-1907, besides also psychology and philosophy in Berlin and Munich. He received his PhD in 1909 in psychology with Theodor Lipps in Munich and completed his habilitation in 1912 in Bonn with Oswald Külpe. 1912-1921 he was interrupted by his military service, lecturer in philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was there in 1921 as an associate professor of legal philosophy. In 1923 he became professor of philosophy, psychology and education at the Graduate School of Mannheim. From 1929 to 1930 he was standing in front of the university rector. Selz was moved into early retirement on April 4, 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In 1938 he was deported to Dachau concentration camp for five weeks and then emigrated in 1939 to Amsterdam, where he conducted research on and taught. 1943 Selz was arrested and taken to the Westerbork transit camp. From there he was taken on 24 August 1943 in a transport train to Auschwitz where he was murdered on August 27, 1943.
The city of Mannheim in 1996 named a street in the castle university after him. In July 2011, a stumbling stone was laid at his last place of residence and place of work in Mannheim.
To mark the 70th anniversary of the death the Otto Selz Institute for Applied Psychology published the University of Mannheim ( OSI) with support from the Mannheim University Library parts of the estate as digitized.
Psychology of thinking
Selz was particularly known for research in the field of the psychology of thinking. His works are related to the Würzburg School. He developed methods for the analysis of thought processes and tried the different cognitive services - from reproductive to productive thought processes - into a theory.
The Würzburg had indeed refuted the associationism, but without being able to establish a theory. Selz developed a complete non- associationist thinking theory, presented the schemes of cognition and problem solving at the center. Thinking sees Selz as a continuum of reproductive and productive intellectual operations. Know as a more or less complete structure ("knowledge complex"). The problem he took on as incomplete knowledge structure whose vacancies ( blank certificate ) is supplemented by deterministic means of abstraction. Together with his conception of the overall task as a schematic anticipation of a target of consciousness so that he takes the concept of the problem space, the means-ends analysis and the basic structure of production systems in advance.
His works were first hardly been received, apply today but as an important precursor of cognitive science.
In addition to theoretical work, his interest also questions of applied psychology. In Mannheim he dealt with the problems of education in school and work and the selection courses.
He tried a synthetic wholeness psychology ' post, which sought to distinguish themselves radically from the Second Leipzig School by Felix Krueger and the Berlin School of Gestalt psychology. ( References to Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl )
The culture and music psychologist Julius Bahle is a student of Selz.