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Articles

The Psychology & Psychopathology of Philosophers

What makes great thinkers tick? Ralph Blumenau examines some theories.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the personalities of philosophers, and this has been both satisfied and stimulated by the publication of several well-written biographies. Danny Postel in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7 June 2002) discussed this phenomenon and provided a list of such books. One of those he mentions is Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought (Oxford 1980). But Scharfstein’s was preceded many years ago by what I think is a much more interesting, if perhaps more controversial, book: Alexander Herzberg’s Zur Psychologie der Philosophie und der Philosophen (Leipzig 1926), published in English by Kegan Paul in 1929 under the title The Psychology of Philosophers, and republished in 1999 by Routledge (at £70!) In this article I will first summarize their findings and then add some reflections of my own.

Herzberg studied the personalities of thirty philosophers, thirteen of whom also figure in Scharfstein’s list of twenty two.

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