History of Psychology Exam 1 Chapters 1, 5, 6, and 9.

Unified Psychology

• "Psychology has developed the prolific character of modern science without the ability to articulate its knowledge. The result is a great and increasing diversity ---- many unrelated methods, findings problems, theoretical languages, schismatic issues, and philosophical positions. Since he wrote those words, the problems he cited have worsened. • Sternberg (2005) believes it time for psychologists to halt the fragmentation of psychology. He suggests that psychologist could reverse course by measuring psychological phenomena using multiple methods rather than relying on one, preferred method. • Abandoning a reliance on narrow theoretical formulations.

Psychology's Phenomena

• 12 high-level phenomena in psychology: Mental competency, mental health, mental processes, parapsychology, personal autonomy, psychological theory, applied psychology, psychomotor performance, psychophysiology, religion and psychology, and resilience. • Parapsychology includes claims about near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, precognition, and UFO sightings. • Interestingly, psychologists as prominent as William James, C.J. Jung, and William McDougall spent much time investigating paranormal phenomena. • The success of any theory is measured by the amount of research it generates. • Another of psychology's early interests was the psychology of religion. Nelson (2006) documents the history of the relationship of science (including psychology) and religion and recommends a return to a broader conception of science so that both psychology and religion can be examined from more similar points of view.

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677)

• Although he lived a simple and austere life, he corresponded widely and met with some of the leading thinkers of his day. • Like most rationalists he was convinced that the road to truth was mathematical and did not rely on perception of the real world. • Furthermore, God was also the cause of everything, making him a determinist. • Determinism-the doctrine that all events are caused by other antecedent events. • Spinoza provided a monistic solution where mind and body were instead two separate views of the same substance. One view saw God and nature as ideas whereas the other saw them as things. This solution to the mind-body problem is called double-aspectism and it avoids the problem of explaining how mind and body affect each other inherent in Descartes's interactionist solution. The study of philosophy was thus the study of God and nature. • Double-aspectism-solution to the mind-body problem in which the mental and physical parts are considered to be separate representations of the same substance. • Human behavior, too, was part of nature and could be studied. • Thus, he defined good as pleasure and evil as pain, with the appropriate passions directing people to the former and repelling them from the latter.

August Comte (1798-1857)

• Comte coined the word "sociology" and sought to create a scientific approach to study society based upon positivism. He rejected much of classical philosophy's tenets and even sought to create a secular alternative to human society. In that scheme he divided human history into three period: theological, metaphysical, and scientific. Naturally, he believed that society had progressed to the last stage. • Positivism-Comte's anti-metaphysical and anti-theological view that argued that knowledge can only be sought through empirical means verifiable by the senses.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) & Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

• Dialectic-the belief that every proposition (the thesis) contains its own negation (the antithesis). • Hegel also made alienation a central concept in his philosophy. Alienation "is the sudden recognition by mind that it exists apart from the only world in which its own existence becomes possible; a world that is somehow different from the known world in which the mind actually is". The concept of alienation has had a prominent role in psychology and the other social sciences since Hegel first defined it. • Alienation-the feeling of being an outsider or of being isolated even while living inside of society or a social group. • The concept of alienation has had a prominent role in psychology and the other social sciences since Hegel first defined it. • The earliest of the social sciences was sociology.

Averroes (1126-1198)

• Exegesis-the critical analysis of texts. • For the first time since the founding of Christianity the primacy of revelation was being questioned. Secularism had emerged. Averroes, through his commentaries on Aristotle, had unwittingly supplied the match for the slow fuse that would eventually detonate and lead to the end of an era and the creation of a new one: The Renaissance.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

• Leibniz independently discovered the calculus. He also invented the binary notation system for numbers and developed one of the earliest mechanical calculators, improving upon Pascal's design. • His output was so extensive that many of his works have yet to be translated and interpreted. • Apperception occurred in humans when they were aware of their own thoughts. In other worlds, apperception was self-consciousness. • Apperception-being conscious of one's own perceptions. • Leibniz was an idealist in that he put reality itself in the mental world. What people perceive as the real world is just the activity of an infinite number of monads (units). Some of those monads are imperceptible. Leibniz called those monads petites perceptions and held that although they were subliminal or imperceptible they could still affect the mind, especially when a large number of them occurred at the same time. Thus Leibniz argued, we might not hear the sound of a single wave breaking upon the shore but we can hear the roar of the ocean, the summed total of many petites perceptions happening at the same time. Freud would later use Leibniz's petites perceptions in his discussions of unconscious motivation.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Marx hoped that his writings would lead to actual societal change through violent means, if necessary. In his analysis of 19th century society, the capitalist class was exploiting the working class. After 1917, Marxist ideas were put into action after the creation of a communist government in Russia and, later, in China.

Hippocrates (460-377 BCE)

• Medical practice from Hippocrates on was dominated by humorism, which was not completely discredited until the 19th century. • Humorism- the belief that health was maintained by a balance of the four humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. • Hippocrates was also well known for his Hippocratic Oath. • Physicians should never do harm, administer poison, induce abortions, have sex with their patients, or violate confidences.

Muhammad and the rise of Islam

• Muhammad had unleashed a battle of faiths that would control the dynamics of history until the present day.

Chapter 9

• Nature-nurture- the philosophical problem regarding the sources of knowledge. In its simplest form the nature-nurture question ascribes the source of knowledge to innate, biological factors (e.g., nature) or learned, experimental factors (e.g., nurture). • Ontogenetic set encompasses effects due to maturation and maturation-environment interactions. • Behavioral determination is always probabilistic... The more precisely one can determine the characteristics of the individual organism, the more accurately one can predict and understand that organism's behavior.

William of Ockham (1287- 1347)

• Ockham's Razor-All things being relatively equal the simpler explanation is the better explanation. • Theology, for Ockham, was a discipline separate from philosophy. He never doubted God's existence but maintained that belief in God came from faith alone. • Secularism-the search for explanation within the confines of the world and its reality, combined with a rejection or diminishment of revealed or otherworldly concepts.

Psychology's Borders

• One way to define psychology is to define what is not. Psychology is not philosophy. But, psychology's oldest border is with philosophy. Questions: Who am I? What is true? What is the difference between right and wrong? What makes something beautiful? • But deep behind philosophy's border are topics that really only appeal to bona fide philosophers such as esthetics, logic, and metaphysics (the study of first principles such as the nature of being).

Philo (20 BCE-50 CE)

• Philo explicitly combined the Hebrew tradition of hearing the word of God, as revealed by their prophets, with the Greek (and later Roman) idea of logos, the belief in a living, rational universe.

Trend in History

• Psychologist have long characterized their history with terms such as structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, humanism, and cognitivism.

Science and Psychology

• Psychology is a science. It is a social science. • Science defined as an activity with three features: 1. Searching for understanding. 2. Creating general laws and principles derived from those searches. 3. Testing those laws and principles experimentally. • Scientist create theories to explain the observations they have made and to point the direction for future observations.

Definition of 21st Century Psychology

• Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

The Black Plague

• The black plague (or bubonic plague), the world's first pandemic, struck Europe in 1348. Over the course of the next three years it killed somewhere between a quarter to a third of Europe's population. • The initial wave of bubonic plague lasted about four years and affected Christian and Islamic communities equally. Many faithful from both religions saw the plague as a manifestation of God's anger with humankind. • Out groups were blamed for the plague, thus Christians blamed Moslems while Moslems, in turn, blamed Christians. Both religions blamed Jews. In Christian Europe many pogroms (assaults on Jews) resulted from such thinking. Unfortunately, the first wave of the plague was not the last. Another wave began in 1356 and subsequent waves continued into the 19th century.

Utilitarianism

• The classic definition of Utilitarianism is moral action that is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. • One of the chief problems of Utilitarianism was the conflict between individual and group good. How would a person act when that action was deleterious personally but good for the group?

Ideas in History

• The ideas we are covering in text focus more on the mind, evolution, mortality, rationality, emotion, personality, and the unconscious. • Typically, ideas tend to be in the zeitgeist a while before someone comes along and synthesizes one or more ideas coherently. • Darwin was not the first person to have the idea of evolution, nor was Freud the first to think of the unconscious. • Truly original ideas are very rare.

The Rise of Christian Faith

• The life and work of Augustine, one of the church fathers, brought the classic era of Greek philosophy to a close.

Chapter 5: From Philosophy to Faith

• The speed of secularization greatly accelerates and gives rise to the earliest traces of modern science in Europe.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

• Ultimately, Aquinas reconciled Christian faith with the powerful logic of Aristotle.

Are There Laws of Psychology

• Unfortunately, no such laws have yet been discovered, nor may they ever be. • There are no universal laws of psychology.

Al-Kindi (800-870)

• We must not be ashamed to admire the truth or to acquire it, from wherever it comes. Even if it should come from far-flung nations and foreign peoples, there is for the student of truth nothing more important than the truth, nor is the truth demeaned or diminished by the one who states or conveys it; no one is demeaned by the truth, rather all are ennobled by it.

Presentism

• Worse still, some historians believed they were writing objective histories but were not because they failed to realize their own inherent biases.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

• John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most influential British philosopher of the 19th century, was a follower of Bentham's. • Mill also argued for the importance of internal constraints on morality such as guilt.

Astronomy

The first true science.

Empiricism

The view that holds that all knowledge comes from experience, especially from sensory experience.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE)

• From that backwater town, he wrote voluminously and almost single-handedly put an end to the era of classical Greek philosophy while launching a new era, one based on revealed knowledge from God and scripture. • First and foremost, he put forth understanding the soul and God as the two most important issues in philosophy. At the same time, however, he still believed that humans were primarily governed by reason. • Augustine held that each soul was immortal, created, immaterial, and changeable. People were composed of body and soul, but soul was far more important His conception of the soul led to an explicit dualism of soul and matter. • Dualism-the philosophical idea that there are two types of phenomena, usually described as mental (mind) or physical (body). • Unlike previous philosophies that searched for and promised virtue and the pursuit of happiness, Augustine's philosophy was more pessimistic. Human virtue was unattainable, and happiness could not be found in life. Instead, the goal of life on Earth was to prepare to know God. Yet, that knowledge required divine illumination of the soul's interior along. • Augustine struggled with the problem of human conduct and forced himself to introspect about his own behavior. He opened the door to an internal cognitive world that he believed was larger and more important to explaining behavior than was the external world. • Phenomenology-the philosophical system that examines conscious experience itself directly, intentionally, and form one's own point of view. • Augustine saw all humans as equals, a position quite different from nearly all of the Greek philosophers. Another difference was that people were responsible for their own conduct. This was Augustine's doctrine of free will, needed in order to resolve the simultaneous existence of worldly evil and an omniscient God. • Another difference was Augustine's emphasis upon motivation or intent. • His ideas, however, lived on and grew in importance for nearly 1,000 years.

Why Study History?

• George Santayana wrote, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. • In psychology, Janis (1972) found that leaders made bad decisions under certain conditions. He called that phenomenon groupthink. The conditions that led to groupthink were the existence of a powerful, isolated, decision-making group, biased leadership, and the presence of high levels of stress. • Among the many differences in 18th century French and British cultures was their dominant philosophy. French philosophy was dominated by rationalism while British philosophy was dominated by empiricism. • A second and more recent example was the exodus of Jewish intellectuals from Nazi Germany prior to World War II.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• He and his family were poor and were Pietists, a reform movement within the Lutheran church that believed in hard work, duty, and prayer. • He was inspired by the writings of Rousseau and Newton and saw himself as the Copernicus of philosophy. • Against Leibniz, Kant argued that reason alone could not yield a cogent rationalist philosophy. • Against Hume, he argued that empirical observations alone cloud not account for the complexities of human behavior. • Kant believed that the human mind came provided with a priori innate organizing principles that enabled it to make sense of experience. • For Kant, a synthetic approach meant that the a priori categories of mind combined with sensory observations to reveal the truths of the physical world. • He held that scientific facts resulted from the combination of observation of the physical world made by a prepared and already organized mind. • Kant's synthetic approach removed the necessity for a place for God in philosophy but kept open a place for worship, reverence, and belief in God. • Kant next turned his attention to practical reason. • Kant's aim was to make moral decisions independent of the empirical world. In other words, he wanted to provide a basis for moral behavior that was free of the relativism of hedonistic impulses.

Al-Farabi (872-950)

• He was also one of the earliest political scientists because he argued that human happiness, what he considered the main goal of life, could not be achieved in isolation.

Avicenna (980-1037)

• His "floating man" thought experiment argued for the existence of the soul. It was convincing and powerful. In it, he posited that a fully mature, freshly created human being, deprived of all sensory input and suspended in the air, would yet be cognizant of existence without any physical stimuli and thus have a soul. • He wrote a long and highly influential medical textbook, Canon of Medicine. • It even included sections on what we would now call psychosomatic medicine.

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• His work attempted to analyze the changing historical relationships between individuals, their sense of freedom, religion, and the rise of an increasingly rational, depersonalized, and controlling bureaucracy.

Plotinus (204-270 CE)

• Human happiness, Plotinus maintained, came from contemplation of the intellect. The highest form of happiness came from trying to understand the contents of the intellect or Plato's Forms. Doing so successfully could lead to a state of ecstasy. Porphyry reported that Plotinus himself had fallen into such real world and deal with matter. Leaving the material world behind and moving toward the Good was the path Plotinus sought.

The Rise of Humanism

• Humanism-the study and application of worldly knowledge for and about secular concerns instead of sacred ones, especially as applied to art and literature. Humanism was inspired by a renewed reverence for classical thinking, especially that of Plato and the Neo-Platonist. Humanism and Secularism go hand and hand. • The original Humanism was new, original, and a reaction to the medieval world. Modern humanism and the humanities have divorced themselves from the earlier form by becoming more secular, academic, and closely linked to human values and dignity. • Humanist also began to integrate and understand in new ways the interrelations between grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, history, and poetry, those five disciplines made up the principal components of Humanism itself. Unlike, the scholastics, humanist saw language, not philosophy, as the main focus of their scholarship. • After, the invention of the printing press in Germany, Humanism took off like a rocket. • The discovery of the New World and its inhabitants also spurred the development of Humanism. • Unlike, the pagan Greek and Roman writers who mostly separated the religious from the secular, the humanists retained their religious fervor and did not separate Christianity from the pursuit of knowledge. The humanist perceived themselves as believers uncovering the wonders of the natural world that their God had created.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

• Humans, Fichte argued, each possessed finite egos that strove to reach the absolute ego, but never could reach that point.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

• In fact, the famous phrase "survival of the fittest" was Spencer's and not Darwin's. One idea often attributed to Spencer, Social Darwinism, was not really his own. • Social Darwinism-the misapplication of Darwinism principles of evolution to explain observed differences between societies or humans groups, especially to justify the status quo.

The 99 Most Eminent Psychologist of the 20th Century

• Jean Piaget, Edward Thorndike, A.H. Maslow