ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to Carl Stumpf's philosophy through a discussion of a problem about simultaneous perception of several objects. This problem is at the heart of several of his works and therefore well suited. Stumpf's books On the Psychological Origin of the Idea of Space and Tonpsychologie are obviously on different topics, yet in both one and the same problem is central. Space is something in which objects are located, they occupy volumes of it, and are related by relations like in front/behind, left-right, on top of etc. Stumpf applied Aristotle's idea that there are common sensibles to the debate between empiricism and nativism. Empiricists had set aside the possibility that one can perceive spatial and qualitative properties like colour together. The chapter proposes to take sensory wholes to be a special case of the more general phenomenon that things, in order for us to see (hear) them, must look (sound) to us a certain way.
