In 1907 Bühler completed his Habilitation thesis at Würzburg, with the title Tatsachen und Probleme zu einer Psychologie der Denkvorgänge ("Facts and problems of the psychology of thought processes"). This text became foundational for the Würzburg School of psychology and sparked heated controversy with Wilhelm Wundt. In 1909 Bühler moved to the University of Bonn, becoming an assistant to Oswald Külpe.
From 1913 to 1918 Bühler worked as an associate professor in Munich. In World War I he performed military service as a doctor. In 1918, he was made a full professor of philosophy and education at the Technical University of Dresden.[citation needed]
In 1922, he became Professor of Psychology at the University of Vienna and the head of the Psychology Department. In the same year Moritz Schlick and Robert Reininger were also appointed as full professors; the latter would become president of the Philosophical Society of Vienna until its disbandment in 1938.[2] Bühler participated in the founding of the Psychological Institute of Vienna as part of the city's efforts to reorganize the school system on the basis of new scientific findings about child psychology. He also worked in the field of the philosophy of language as a follower of the school of Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Josef Klemens Kreibig and Alois Höfler.[2]
Bühler's wife, Charlotte Bühler, followed him and received a professorship in Vienna. Both taught at the University of Vienna until their common emigration.[citation needed]
On 23 March 1938, Bühler was briefly detained by the Nazis, which caused him to flee to London in 1940, then to Oslo. Finally he emigrated to the United States, where he worked from 1940 to 1945 as a professor in Minnesota and from 1945 to 1955 as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.[citation needed]
In 1959 Karl Bühler was honored with the Wilhelm Wundt Medal of the German Society of Psychology.