Gustav Fechner
Fechner, along with Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann von Helmholtz, is recognized as one of the founders of modern experimental psychology. His clearest contribution was the demonstration that because the mind was susceptible to measurement and mathematical treatment, psychology had the potential to become a quantified science. Theorists such as Immanuel Kant had long stated that this was impossible, and that therefore, a science of psychology was also impossible.
Freud and Philosophy
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation () is a 1965 book about Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, in which the author interprets Freud's work in terms of hermeneutics, the theory of the rules that govern the interpretation of a particular text, and discusses phenomenology, a school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl. The book was first published in France by Éditions du Seuil, and in the United States by Yale University Press. Ricœur argues that psychoanalysis should be understood not as an observational science, but as an "interpretation" that resembles history rather than psychology. He compares Freud to the philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, describing the trio as a "school of suspicion", and explores similarities and differences between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. He also compares Freud's ideas to those of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, criticizes Freud's views on religion, discusses language, and further develops ideas about symbols explored in his earlier work "The Symbolism of Evil" (1960).