Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776 – 1841

Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist, and educational theorist, and the principal opponent of post-Kantian idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Successor to Kant in the chair at Konigsberg and later professor at Gottingen, he developed a realist metaphysics in which reality consists of simple, qualitatively determined substances called reals, whose relations give rise to apparent change. His General Theory of Pedagogy and Psychology as a Science articulated a quantitative psychology of the interplay of mental presentations and a carefully reasoned theory of moral education. The Herbartian school dominated German pedagogy until the early twentieth century.