[Anatomists, philosophers, "head hunters": Gall, Kant and the early days of phrenology].

Abstract

In 1798, the German physician and anatomist Franz Joseph Gall, after his transfer to Vienna, published a pioneer paper that gave rise to the Schädellehre (skull-doctrine): a new discipline (today better known under the spurious name of phrenology) aimed at the study of the functional relations between mental faculties, cerebral areas, and skull bumps. During that same period (1796-1798), several Kantian texts began to circulate, in which--polemicizing with J.C. Lavater, and S.Th. Soemmerring--some anthropological and psychological issues, present also in Gall's paper (e.g., "the inner and outer side of man," "skull morphology," "the organ of the soul," etc.) were dealt with, but in an independent way. Kant will come to know of the Schädellehre only in the last years of his life, showing an unexpected interest in the subject. Proof of this may be found not only in the testimony of his Tischgenossen (table friends), but also in some posthumous notes (AA XV/2, AA XXI: 1802-1803), which are the object of a still controversial interpretation. In 1804, upon the death of the philosopher--on the background of the striking contemporaneous occurrence of the so-called "skull hunt" (Schädeljagd), raging at that time in the Austro-German area--also Kant's skull, like those of other prominent figures, became the object of a phrenological investigation, as Gall had for a long time been hoping.