David Rakison: Academic Lineage
[by dint of direct PhD advisorship for
those who had PhDs, and by primary scientific mentorship otherwise.
Thanks to Brian Scholl for doing much of
the legwork]
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Otto Mencke
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Otto Mencke
Biographical Notes
Mencke was born in 1644 in
His importance to the
scientific milieu was inestimable, however, since in cooperation with Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz he founded and served as chief editor for the first academic
journal in
Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen (16??-17??)
Wichmannshausen, in addition to being Otto Mencke's student, was
also his son-in-law. Though his thesis was on ethics, he was primarily an
orientalist.
Christian
August Hausen (1693-1743)
Biographical Notes
Hausen, born in
Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (1719 – 1800)
Kästner was a leading German
mathematician of his day, especially well known for writing prominent textbooks
and encyclopedias. He originally intended to study the philosophy of law,
following his father (a Professor of Jurisprudence), but he ended up focusing
on mathematics. He was awarded his Ph.D. in
Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben (1744-1777)
Erxleben is regarded as the founder of modern veterinary science and training
in
Christian
Ehrenfried von Weigel (1748-1831)
German by birth, Weigel joined the faculty of the
Karl Asmund Rudolphi (1771-1832)
Rudolphi, the "father of
helminthology" (the study of worms, especially parasitic worms) grew up in
Rudolphi conducted research
across many fields (including botany, zoology, anatomy, and physiology), and is
perhaps best known as one of the earliest proponents of the view that plants
are built out of cells. In 1804 he shared a major prize from the Royal Society
of Science in
Johannes
Peter Müller (1801-1858)
Müller was arguably the most
important physiologist of his time, and synthesized an incredible array of
scientific ideas and results into a cohesive system. He was born in Coblenz and
(after narrowly averting a career in theology) entered the
Müller's most prominent
publication was probably his multi-volume Physiologie des Menschen,
published between 1833 and 1840 (translated by William Baly into English in
1842 as 'Elements of Physiology'). This book was a landmark in the field, and
for the first time brought together physiology with human and comparative
anatomy, clinical practice, as well as aspects of chemistry and physics. For
the rest of the 19th century, this was thus the textbook in physiology.
He also did notable work in many other areas, including vision, anatomy,
developmental embryology, endocrinology, and the study of speech and hearing.
He was the first to use the microscope in pathology. Perhaps his most notable
work on vision science was his work on visual hallucinations. He frequently
hallucinated himself as a child, 'seeing' "images of people moving against
the white wall of the house opposite to his". His later work on this topic
-- published in 1826 as a book with the wonderful title On fantastic visual
appearances (Uber die phantastischen gesichtserscheinungen), is considered
a landmark in the psychiatric study of hallucinations, and articles about its
importance continue to be published today. His greatest failing, in hindsight,
was his unceasing support of vitalism -- the view that it was impossible
to reduce living processes to mechanical laws. This belief -- perhaps a
holdover from his early education at
Müller's most famous and
lasting scientific accomplishment was his formulation of the doctrine of specific
nerve energy, which maintained that perceptual experience was the result of
the nature of the stimulated sense-organ rather than the nature of the
stimulation, per se. In his words: "[T]he same cause, such as electricity,
can simultaneously affect all sensory organs, since they are all sensitive to
it; and yet, every sensory nerve reacts to it differently; one nerve perceives
it as light, another hears its sound, another one smells it; another tastes the
electricity, and another one feels it as pain and shock.... [S]ensation is not
the conduction of a quality or state of external bodies to consciousness, but
the conduction of a quality or state of our nerves to consciousness, excited by
an external cause." (As noted much later by Boring, this doctrine was not
wholly original to Müller, but it was he who synthesized all of the
evidence for it, and brought it to the attention of the scientific world.)
Müller had a reputation
as a first-rate mentor, and gathered together many of the best students in all
of
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821 – 1894)
Helmholtz was an incredible polymath, and
one of the 19th century's greatest scientists. He achieved the height of
scientific accomplishment in his generation, and was roughly equally well known
in different stages of his career as a biologist, physicist, physician,
philosopher, and mathematician. Of his many accomplishments, he is perhaps best
known for producing the first mathematical formulation of the Law of
Conservation of Energy. He read this paper to the Physical Society of Berlin
in 1847, but the older members in the society deemed it too speculative and
rejected it for publication in Annalen der Physik -- which just goes to
show that having a paper rejected doesn't mean it won't stand the test of time
as an icon of scientific discovery through the ages.
Helmholtz was confined to his
home in
Beyond his work on the Law of
Conservation of Energy, he also did prominent and internationally renowned work
on many other topics in physics, ranging from the hydrodynamics of vortex
motion to the formulation of the double-charged layer at an electrode/electrolyte
interface. (Much of his work in physics and electrodynamics is not well known
today, since it depended on assumptions about the ether, a concept which of
course was eventually destroyed by Einstein's theories of relativity.) He did equally
important work in physiology, and was the first person to estimate the rate of
travel of nerve impulses (~ 27 meters/second -- something his mentor
Müller claimed in print would be impossible to measure). This work
introduced the concept of reaction time to the field of physiology, and helped
to demolish the doctrine of vitalism (enthusiastically propounded by his mentor
Müller; see above). Throughout this work, Helmholtz was also an imposing
inventor and engineer, inventing (among many other things) the ophthalmoscope
(familiar today from any visit to an optometrist), the ophthalmometer
(used for measuring the accommodation of the eye -- eventually the topic of the
first scientific publication of Carl Seashore [see below], his academic
great-grandson), the myograph (used for measuring the speed of nerve
impulses), and the Helmholtz Resonaters (built from resonating spheres
that could be used for analyzing and creating the constituent tones of complex
natural sounds).
Closer to home, Helmholtz
extended Müller's doctrine of 'specific nerve energies' (see above) to
offer a comprehensive theory of color vision, predicting (for the wrong
reasons) that the early visual system would contain three primary kinds of
photoreceptors. He also propounded a theory of perception as unconscious
inference, discussing why the contents of our conscious visual experience
are not simple records of retinal input, but rather contain structure that is
and must be indirectly inferred via automatic educated guesses. He proposed
that what is perceived are essentially those objects and events that under
normal conditions would be most likely to produce the received sensory
stimulation, judged against inborn assumptions about the structure of the
world. This principle (of 'coincidence avoidance') remains a powerful
explanatory tool today for an incredibly broad range of visual phenomena, and
the principle continues to be directly discussed as an overarching theory of
vision (e.g. in a 2005 chapter by his academic great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson).
Helmholtz also laid the foundations for the modern science of acoustics, in his
1863 book, On the Sensation of Tone as a Psychological Basis for the Theory
of Music.
Johannes von Kries (1853-1928)
In the second half of the 19th century
Johannes von Kries, a physiologist who was applying probability theory to the
evaluation of the effectiveness of new drugs, realised that the computation of
probability distributions depends on the classification of symptoms and pathologies
into diseases. Confronted with a setting where the crucial uncertainty was the
very definition of "events" by the experimenter, von Kries developed
the logical foundations of a probability theory where the subjectivity of
mental representations may impair the possibility of assigning numerical values
to probabilities. With a series of distortions and misunderstandings, von
Kries's ideas passed on to Keynes and formed the core of his economics.
Johannes von Kries wrote one of
the most philosophically important works on the foundation of probability after
P. S. Laplace and before the First World War, his Principien der
Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung (1886, repr. 1927). In this book, von Kries
developed a highly original interpretation of probability, which maintains it
to be both logical and objectively physical.
Karl Bühler (1879-1963)
Karl Bühler obtained a doctorate in
Medicine at the
The breadth of
Karl and Charlotte Bühlers' interests can best be seen by a look at their
major publications. Karl's studies in the psychology of thinking stood at the
beginning of his carreer. However one might judge their worth today (after the
"Cognitive Revolution"), they still constitute (to our knowledge) the
earliest attempt at the study of complex thought in the psychological
laboratory and should be seen against the background of Wundt's program for
psychology and Wundt's dismissal of the study of higher mental processes with
the experimental method.
Next there are Bühler's studies on perception and his notion of Gestalt
psychology which he however understood as a competitor to the
Another important early focus of Bühler's work and collaboration with
Charlotte Bühler was developmental psychology. Bühler wrote the most
read German textbook on the issue (at least until Piaget became available in the
German speaking world) titled "Die geistige Entwicklung des Kindes"
(1918). This textbook appeared in numerous editions and was translated into
many languages (e.g. its Russian translation was preceded by a very favorable
introduction written by Lev Vygotsky). In fact, Bühler had just finished
the book when he came to Dresden (on a personal level it was inspired by their
first child which was about two or three when they came to Dresden -- this is
certainly in good tradition of developmental psychology!). Bühler's
treatment of the mental development of the child shows a strong concern for the
cognitive questions of representation and language. The study of language under
a cognitive perspective eventually developed into one of Bühler's most important
interests which culminated in his monumental "Sprachtheorie" (1934).
In this respect Bühler is certainly one of the most important forerunners
of semiotics and contemporary cognitive linguistics (see, in particular, works
of Fillmore and Lakoff).
Karl Popper (1902-1994)
Karl Popper is generally regarded as one
of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He was also a
social and political philosopher of considerable stature, a self-professed
‘critical-rationalist’, a dedicated opponent of all forms of scepticism,
conventionalism, and relativism in science and in human affairs generally, a
committed advocate and staunch defender of the ‘Open Society’, and
an implacable critic of totalitarianism in all of its forms. One of the many
remarkable features of Popper's thought is the scope of his intellectual
influence. In the modern technological and highly-specialised world scientists
are rarely aware of the work of philosophers; it is virtually unprecedented to
find them queuing up, as they have done in Popper's case, to testify to the
enormously practical beneficial impact which that philosophical work has had
upon their own. But notwithstanding the fact that he wrote on even the most
technical matters with consummate clarity, the scope of Popper's work is such that
it is commonplace by now to find that commentators tend to deal with the
epistemological, scientific and social elements of his thought as if they were
quite disparate and unconnected, and thus the fundamental unity of his
philosophical vision and method has to a large degree been dissipated.
His rise from a
modest background as an assistant cabinet maker and school teacher to one of
the most influential theorists and leading philosophers was characteristically
Austrian. Popper commanded international audiences and conversation with him
was an intellectual adventure - even if a little rough -, animated by a myriad
of philosophical problems. His intense desire to tear away at the veneer of
falsity in pursuit of the truth lead him to contribute to a field of thought
encompassing (among others) political theory, quantum mechanics, logic,
scientific method and evolutionary theory. Popper challenged some of the ruling
orthodoxies of philosophy: logical positivism, Marxism, determinism and
linguistic philosophy. He argued that there are no subject matters but only
problems and our desire to solve them. He said that scientific theories cannot
be verified but only tentatively refuted, and that the best philosophy is about
profound problems, not word meanings. Isaiah
Nearly every
first-year philosophy student knows that Popper regarded his solutions to the
problems of induction and the demarcation of science from pseudo-science as his
greatest contributions. So I would like to mention some other aspects of
Popper's work that are sometimes neglected. Popper's work is important not just
to those who agree with his new bold solutions, but to everyone who recognizes
the importance of the problems that Popper discovered, analysed and
reformulated in a way that allows a solution. (Anyone who doubts the importance
of"getting the question right", of revealing the web of sub-problems
of a problem and their disparate connections to apparently unrelated domains,
should consult the history of Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem.)
To take just three examples, the problems of verisimilitude, of probability (a
life-long love of his), and of the relationship between the mind and body will
never look the same now that Popper has made important progress in charting the
intricate structure of these problems and in offering at least partial
solutions. Yet there are books on the mind/body problem, for instance, that
simply do not mention Popper's work (for more on this attempted
"refutation by neglect", see the introductory reading list).
Popper was a
Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the
Jack Tizard (1919-1979)
Jack Tizard was a pioneer of community care in
To have started his professional
life researching the field of 'mental deficiency' proved an excellent
initiation into the study of social disadvantage and its ecology. A large
proportion of the milder cases, the majority of the hospitals' population, were
drawn from environmental conditions promoting under-functioning, often
involving gross neglect or cruelty. Jack had shown that the average IQ of these
'feeble-minded' persons, compulsorily detained in 12 hospitals, was 70 (traditionally
the upper limit of intellectual disability), with a wide range around the mean.
Jack's conviction that people
with learning disabilities should have access to the services available to the
rest of the population, and not in the first instance specialist services, was
an early expression of the need for social inclusion. His role as one of the
authors of the famous Isle of Wight Study reflected his interest in the needs
of all handicapped children. This total geographical sample of 10 year olds
identified four types of disabling condition: psychiatric disorder,
intellectual disability, physical problems and educational retardation. These
often occurred in combination; thus some 16% of the child population was
affected by one or more handicaps. Jack had frequently demonstrated the
important implications for social policy of psychological research. During his
last decade, his interests began to turn away from the needs of the
learning-disabled to those of families with pre-school children. Then he began
to study the quality of life which could and should be possible for the
physically disabled. A further very important interest developed in exploring
the educational resources which could be provided by parents. A very ingenious
experiment with primary schools gave results which had a widespread influence
on the teaching of reading involving parental input.
Neil O’Connor (19??-1993)
Neil O'Connor was one of the
Early in his career Neil carried
out, in collaboration with Professor Jack Tizard, pioneering work on the
influence of remand homes on young people. He was Research Psychologist for the
MRC at the
Peter Bryant (19??-present)
Peter Bryant is currently Watts Professor
of Psychology and Fellow of Wolfson College at
George Butterworth
(1946-2000).
George was an authority on infant development, and internationally
respected for his scholarship, for his committment to research and for the
energy he brought to fostering infancy work both nationally and
internationally.
After completing his D.Phil at
George's research interests were broad,
encompassing topics as varied as the origins of self awareness in human
development and evolution, and children's understanding of geographical
features of the earth. But his most distinguished contribution was his work on
the origins of thought and perception in infants, a field in which he was a
world authority. His work on infant pointing and its role in cognitive
development is on display in the
For more about
George click here to read an article about the man and
his work published in Developmental Science.