George Stout

Who was George Stout?

George Frederick Stout, usually cited as G. F. Stout, was a leading English philosopher and psychologist. Born in South Shields, he studied psychology at Cambridge University from under James Ward. Like Ward, Stout employed a philosophical approach to psychology and opposed the theory of associationism.

It was as a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, that Stout published his first work in 1896: the two-volume Analytic Psychology, whose view of the role of activity in intellectual processes was later verified experimentally by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Stout was appointed to a new lectureship in Comparative Psychology at the University of Aberdeen in 1896, before becoming reader in mental philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he published his Manual of Psychology in 1899. This work formulated many principles later developed experimentally by the Gestalt school of psychology. Leaving Oxford, from 1903 to 1936, Stout served as professor of logic and metaphysics at St. Andrews, Fife, where he published another major work, Mind and Matter in 1931. He remained at St. Andrews until his retirement thirty years later, in 1936.