Abstract

This study aims to account for the reception of the philosophy of Carl Stumpf since the turn of the twenty-first century and to emphasize the actuality of some of the aspects of his philosophy. The present text is subdivided into several sections, each corresponding to one of the main topics discussed in the recent literature on the work of Stumpf. In the first section, I try to show, using his classification of sciences, that Stumpf's empirical work is driven by a unitary philosophical program. I then examine the ramifications of this program in several areas of philosophy that have been the subject of recent commentaries and publications. I begin with the commentaries on the recent publication of Stumpf's thesis on mathematical axioms, which stress Stumpf's contribution to the philosophy of mathematics and to theory of knowledge, and more specifically to the debate on logical psychologism that Frege and Husserl will address a few years later. I conclude this section by examining the second of two major themes in the work of Stumpf that have been the subject of several recent studies, namely, on the one hand, logic and the nature of states of affairs and, on the other hand, Stumpf's contribution to the mind-body problem and to the topic of relations. The third section is divided into two parts. In the first one, I try to briefly account for the vast literature on Stumpf's contribution to psychology understood broadly enough as to include his work on the psychology of sound, Gestalt psychology, animal psychology and the psychology of child development. I provide, in the second part of this section, a summary of his studies in the area of aesthetics and musicology in general, i.e. his contribution to the history of music and its origins, to ethnomusicology, and to acoustics. Although this study does not aim at being exhaustive, it provides an overview of the important aspects of Stumpf's contribution to philosophy.