Louis William Stern, the German philosopher and psychologist, was born in Berlin and received his PhD under Hermann Ebbinghaus in Berlin in 1892. From 1897 to 1915 he taught philosophy and psychology at the University of Breslau, and in 1915 he moved to Hamburg, where, in 1919, he helped to found the University of Hamburg. He was forced into exile in 1933 by the Nazi government and became professor of psychology and philosophy at Duke University. He died in Durham, North Carolina.

As a psychologist Stern revolted against the elementarism (the belief in the adequacy of analysis of consciousness into its elementary parts) current in Germany before the general acceptance of Gestalt psychology. In his early studies of the perception of change and motion, he employed phenomenological methods and anticipated some later developments in Gestalt psychology. He soon gave up psychophysical experimentation, however, and pioneered in various fields...