Theodor Lipps, a psychologist and philosopher, was born in Wallhalben, Rhineland-Palatinate. He studied theology and natural science at Erlangen, Tübingen, Utrecht, and Bonn. He obtained academic positions in Bonn (1884), Breslau (1890), and finally in Munich (1894), where he remained until his death. There he was a full professor and the teacher of Johannes Daubert and Alexander Pfänder, the founding members of the Munich circle of phenomenology. Lipps published voluminously on a large variety of topics, though his orientation in philosophy was consistently a psychological one.

In Basic Facts of Mental Life (1883) Lipps states his conception of philosophy as follows: "Inner experience is the basis for psychology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, and the adjunct disciplines, including metaphysics in the sense in which it is permissible to speak of it. We regard all these disciplines now as philosophical, and at least in the main they fill what...