ABSTRACT
Paolo Bozzi challenges the myth that Gestalt theory appeared “without trace” in 1912 with the publication of M. Wertheimer’s experimental studies of movement perception, and convincingly traces this line of thought back to Goethe and I. Kant, and even to Plato and Aristotle. In 1930, Kluver drew a distinction between Gestalt psychology, with its physicalist analogies, and “work on Gestaltqualitaten”. The various individuals connected with Gestaltism may have all shared a commitment to a phenomenological method, but there are several key issues on which they also agreed or disagreed. One outcome of the deployment of the phenomenological method within perceptual research is rather ironic. J. J. Gibson’s early work was explicitly phenomenological, not least in relation to his fundamental contrast between the unbounded “visual world” and a delimited “visual field”. The experimental phenomenologists were intent on both re-enchanting the world, and de-subjectifying experience.
