Yrjö Reenpää

Yrjö Reenpää

Yrjö Reenpää , until 1935 Renqvist (born July 18, 1894 in Helsinki , † December 18, 1976 ibid) was a Finnish physiologist and philosopher and professor of physiology at the University of Helsinki . He developed the general sensory physiology on the basis of the Kantian epistemology and phenomenology and dealt intensively with the psycho-physical problem.

Life

Yrjö Reenpää's father, Alvar Renqvist, was the owner and director of a large Finnish publishing house; he was a professor and a member of parliament. After graduating from high school in 1912, Yrjö Reenpää began studying medicine at the University of Helsinki. Early on he concentrated on research in physiology under the guidance of Robert Tigerstedt , the first professor of physiology at the University of Helsinki. He wrote his doctoral thesis in 1918 in the field of sensory physiology on taste . After working for a few years in the Finnish Army as a doctor and at the Psychophysiological Institute of the Finnish Air Force , he returned to the Physiological Institute in Helsinki in 1925, where he continued his sensory and perceptual physiological research. After the death of Carl Tigerstedt , the son and successor of Robert Tigerstedt, Yrjö Reenpää was appointed to the chair of physiology in 1927, which he held until his retirement in 1962. In the years before the Second World War , Reenpää visited several physiological institutes in Germany and established close relationships with other sensory physiologists, such as Max von Frey , Johannes von Kries or Viktor von Weizsäcker . In the war years 1939–1944 he served as head of the medical department in the Ministry of Defense and, like 20 years earlier, acted as head of the psychophysiological department of the Finnish Air Force as a " lieutenant colonel in health care".

General sensory physiology

After Yrjö Reenpää initially dealt with empirical studies in sensory physiology, essentially with the sensory areas of taste, touch, muscles and movement, he concentrated more and more on fundamental questions of sensory physiology and psychophysics in the 1930s . He contrasted the causal stimulus-sensation relation of classical sensory physiology with a mapping relationship between the (e.g. physically specifiable) stimulus parameters, the images of the internal excitation processes in the senses and the phenomenal images of sensations. Reenpää presented the structure of the psycho-physical relations in an axiomatic form and related them directly to the categories of Kantian epistemology and phenomenology (including Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger ). By he and his co-workers u. a. Alvar Wilska, Eeva Jalavisto and RM Bergström, his later successor, applied this psycho-physical method in the experiments, they were able to empirically and evidently show the structures of the perceptual manifolds in different sensory areas. After his retirement, Reenpää expanded his philosophical considerations further and included the psychophysical problem in the more comprehensive of the mind-body problem . He reflected a psycho-physical parallelism, where he thematized the relationships between sensory perceptions and the stimulations in the sensory nerves, as they were carried out in particular in the studies on hearing by Wolf Dieter Keidel and his colleagues at the University of Erlangen, where Reenpää was a visiting professor .

philosophy

On the basis of his investigations into the physiology of the senses and perception, Reenpää demonstrated that perceptions provide the basis for the concepts of knowledge , i.e. also for the scientific concepts. It shows that the terminology can be traced back to phenomenal perceptions in analogy with the Kantian table of categories. He thus founds the conceptuality in the variety of senses, that is, according to Kant, in perception. The single-digit element of time (one of the a priori forms of perception in Kant ) takes on operational significance in Reenpää. By having a view, i. H. a sense experience is brought into a conceptual form, it is removed from time. First the phenomenal structure of what is sensually given should be grasped. This is followed by the mapping of these quantities to the dimensional terms of mathematics, physics or chemistry. He is therefore concerned with a conformal or isomorphic mapping of the magnitudes of the phenomenal space into the conceptual space of the stimulus magnitudes.

Other cultural activities

In addition to his scientific activities, Yrjö Reenpää u. a. President of the Finnish Medical Association (Duodecim; 1933–36), President of the Nordic Society of Physiology (1936–39), Chairman of the Finnish Academy of Sciences (1942–43). In 1939 he was appointed a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . Yrjö Reenpää was one of the founders of the Finnish Cultural Foundation, of which he was chairman from 1937 to 1953. Since 1979, the Finnish Cultural Foundation has given a lecture every year and awards a medal bearing Reenpää's name. Well-known and respected scientists from various disciplines from all over the world are invited.

Important publications

• General sensory physiology , Springer, Vienna, 1936.
• On perceiving, thinking and trying to measure , Biblioth Biotheor Se D II, 1-248, EJ Brill, Leiden, 1947.
• The duality of the mind , Sitzungsb Heidelberg Akad Wiss Mat-naturwiss K1 Abh, 1-76, 1950.
• The mind as an intuition and concept , Ann Acad sci Fenn Ser BT 76, 1-113, 1952.
• Development of general sensory physiology. Foundation of a science of observation , Vittorio Klostermann, Fr.aM, 1959.
• Sensory Perception Theory , Ann Acad sci Fenn Ser AV Medica 78, 1961.
• General sensory physiology , Vittorio Klostermann, Fr.aM, 1962.
• On time, presentation and commentary on some interpretations of the temporal in philosophy. About time in the natural sciences , Acta phil Fennic. XIX, 1966.
• Perceiving, observing, constituting. Phenomenology and definition of the first acts of knowledge , Vittorio Klostermann, Fr.aM, 1967.
• On the body-soul problem, newer philosophical conceptions , in New Anthropology, Volume 5, Psychological Anthropology (Ed. H.-G. Gadamer, P. Vogler), Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart, 1973.

Secondary literature

• Herbert Hensel : General sensory physiology, skin senses, taste, smell , Springer, 1966.
• Dieter Schaffrath: Borderline questions of philosophical and empirical consideration of consciousness, The psychophysical problem from a philosophical point of view with special consideration of the sensory physiology Yrjö Reenpääs , Thesis, Rheinisch-Westfälisch-Technische Hochschule Aachen, 1979.
• J. Tyrkkö, T. Jauhiainen, V. Häkkinen, D. Schaffrath: Yrjö Reenpää, sensory physiologist and philosopher between Finland and Germany, meeting reports of the Physico-Medical Society in Erlangen , Volume 10, Issue 1 (Ed. Karl-Heinz Plattig), Palm & Enke, Erlangen and Jena, 2006.