Who Is Kurt Lewin?

This article focuses on Kurt Lewin, who grew up on a farm in Germany. It is perhaps this early down to earth experience which is responsible for what he likes to call one of his pet prejudices: that when a philosopher can't turn a key to open a door, one may suspect that his theory does not unlock any great wisdom, either. Dr. Lewin received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Berlin and soon thereafter he went to war as a private and later became an officer in the German army. He emerged from the experience wounded in the knee and with an intense interest in how the army thinks as compared with civilians. It was then that he wrote a paper about the psychological landscape of a soldier. In 1922 he became an instructor at the University of Berlin, where he taught psychology and philosophy. He settled in the United States in 1933 to teach successively at Cornell University, New York and the University of Iowa, with intermittent teaching sessions at the University of California and Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.