»He who sows the sparks shall reap the fire«

Abstract

On February 19, 1915, Oswald Külpe gave a speech on "Ethics and the War" in Munich. Nothing in Külpe's philosophical and psychological oeuvre could have foreshadowed this speech, which disregarded individual life and which justified and partly glorified the war. In this context, Külpe himself spoke about the strong urge to "relearn regarding ethics", given the current events (Külpe, 1915a, p. 41). Therefore, this contribution attempts to develop an understanding for Külpe's war-related ethics and its genesis by looking at a description of his personality and by comprehending his line of argument. Despite of the discovery of single character traits that explain his acting, the contribution concludes that even an intelligent man as Oswald Külpe had become a compliant victim of the zeitgeist.