Object and Reality

Paul Ferdinand Linke as an Early Pioneer of a Phenomenological Psychology

Abstract

Paul Ferdinand Linke (1876–1955) was a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Jena who, inspired by Bernard Bolzano, Gottlob Frege, and Franz Brentano, sought a fruitful connection between psychology and phenomenology. Linke himself worked experimentally on motion perception and developed his own theory of perception. He distinguished a phenomenological from an empirical approach: Perception, from the phenomenological perspective, is intentionally structured and is given in an act. In contrast, from the empirical perspective, persons have a dispositionally structured psychophysical organization that enables them to constitute objects of experience. Linke’s core concern was to overcome subjectivism in philosophy and here especially in Edmund Husserl’s transcendental or experiential phenomenology. Linke opposes this with his so-called object phenomenology, which proceeds ontologically and develops a different concept of experience. Linke problematizes the transcendental egology of transcendental phenomenology. In contrast, object phenomenology has a realist foundation. This article wants to trace Linke’s epistemological path in the distinction between observing and looking to a realist psychology and to discuss which significance his conception has in phenomenological psychology.