Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann

Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1 July 1801, Leipzig – 21 April 1877, Halle an der Saale) was a German physiologist, anatomist, and philosopher.

Together with Gustav Theodor Fechner, who got his degree in medicine in 1822, and Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), they formed a small intellectual group which dissolved only in 1837 when Volkmann received his professorship in Dorpat (now Tartu).

Fechner developed his classical psychophysical Method of average error (already in use in astronomy) in co-operation with Volkmann.

[1] Volkmann's extensive experimental data in that book[5] was the main basis on which Ewald Hering developed his theory of hyperacuity in 1899.

[6] Philosophically, Volkmann was an evangelical who opposed materialism and gave a number of speeches against the materialist assumption of identity between the body and mind.