Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Brief Lives

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)

Dylan Daniel looks at the philosophical insights of a remarkable scientist.

Hermann von Helmholtz is a name that is not uttered frequently enough anymore. But this remarkable scientist, and philosopher, contributed to modern thought a veritable treasure trove of concepts and inventions. His mind had an uncanny way of attacking a problem at several levels simultaneously, yielding extraordinary results. He invented and popularized the ophthalmoscope, participated in describing non-Euclidean geometry, published across many disciplines, including physiology, psychology, physics, and philosophy, and in 1995 the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers was created to commemorate his myriad contributions to science. Yet perhaps the greatest innovation to which Helmholtz contributed is still being developed in philosophy, psychology, and the neurosciences: a deep understanding of the human mind.

…