Interview with Wilhelm Büttemeyer

The 15th of September 2020 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the death of the Mantuan philosopher Roberto Ardigò (1828–1920), one of the leading figures of Italian positivism and among the most influential promoters of experimental psychology in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., Lazzeroni, 1972, pp. 72–73; Luccio, 1978, p. 45; Marhaba, 1981, pp. 114–24; Cimino & Foschi, 2012, pp. 310–11). Wilhelm Büttemeyer is one of the main scholars of Italian positivism and in particular of Ardigò’s thought. He edited his correspondence with Pasquale Villari and the critical edition of his remaining correspondence (Ardigò & Villari, 1973; Ardigò, 1990, 2000). Starting from the seminal essay on Roberto Ardigò and modern psychology (Büttemeyer, 1969), he has dedicated several contributions to Ardigò’s psychology and to its epistemological and theoretical implications (Büttemeyer, 1974, 1980, 1991, 1998, 2001, 2010, 2011; Giora & Büttemeyer, 2020). We therefore refer to him as a specialist who devoted more than five decades of in-depth studies to the history of Italian psychology.