History of Psychology

Chapter9KardasFinal.ppt

Chapter 9:
MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Zeitgeist

Introduction

Introduction

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677)
His first book, the only one published under his name during his lifetime, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy.
Determinism ― the doctrine that all events are caused by other antecedent events.
Spinoza was determined to consider God and nature as a single entity.

Introduction

Double-aspectism a solution to the mind - body problem in which the mental and physical parts are considered to be separate representations of the same substance.

Introduction

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Leibniz independently discovered calculus.
He developed one of the earliest mechanical calculators.
Pre-established harmony ― the mind-body solution in which mental events affect other mental events and physical events affect other physical events but each cannot affect the other. God willed the apparent coordination between mind and body at the time of creation.
Apperception ― being conscious of one’s own perceptions.
Leibniz’s main contribution to rationalism was that he inspired Immanuel Kant.

Introduction

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Kant’s critical philosophy integrated rationalist and empiricist approaches to knowledge and provided an alternative to hedonistic interpretations 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.

Introduction

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Kant proposed 12 categories: unity, plurality, and totality for the concept of quantity; reality, negation, and limitation for the concept of quality; inherence and subsistence, cause and effect, and community for the concept of relation; and possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, and necessity and contingency for the concept of modality
In addition to the categories, Kant proposed two innate intuitions: space and time.

Introduction

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Singlehandedly, he showed a necessary connection between rationalism and empiricism, peacefully separated philosophy from theology, and provided an innate role for reason in the making of moral decisions.

Other 19th Century Philosophies

Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism distinguished between things that caused pleasure to an individual and things that maximized pleasure for an entire group.
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
Every action had to be judged by its utility (e.g., its benefit) to the group in question.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
Differentiated Bentham’s pleasures into categories of higher and lower, with the intellectual pleasures being the highest.

Other 19th Century Philosophies

Romanticism
Romanticism was a complex response to many simultaneous and competing social forces and changes that arose at the end of the 18th century.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)
Fichte’s idealism combined Kant’s dualisms, understanding and sensibility, into one idea, the absolute ego.

Figure 9.1

Other 19th Century Philosophies

Romanticism
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) & Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
They proposed a new and radical solution, to Kant’s dualism, absolute idealism.

Other 19th Century Philosophies

Dialectic ― the belief that every proposition (the thesis) contains its own negation (the antithesis), and that their resolution produced an advance in knowledge (the synthesis), which in turn becomes a new thesis, causing the process to repeat itself, but at a new level of knowledge.
Alienation ― the feeling of being an outsider or of being isolated even while living inside of society or a social group.

Social Sciences

Auguste Comte (1798–1857)
Comte coined the word “sociology.”
Positivism ― Comte’s anti-metaphysical and anti-theological view that argued that knowledge can only be sought through empirical means verifiable by the senses.
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
The first person to hold an academic appointment in sociology.

Social Sciences

Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Marx hoped that his writings would lead to actual societal change through violent means, if necessary.
Max Weber (1864–1920)
Weber believed in and promoted an anti-positivistic approach to social science.

Social Sciences

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
Spencer, unlike Darwin, believed that everything—animals, people, and society—progressed in one direction: from simple to complex.
Spencer sought to explain the links between psychology and physiology.
Social Darwinism ― the misapplication of Darwinian principles of evolution to explain observed differences between societies or human groups, especially to justify the status quo.

Social Sciences

Alexander Bain (1818–1903)
Psychophysical parallelism the mind-body problem solution that allows for two separate systems—one for physical events and the other for mental events—but prohibits them from affecting each other.
Bain argued that spontaneous behaviors arose and were then associated with the positive or negative consequences that followed those behaviors.

Social Sciences

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841)
He opposed Fichte’s idealism and Kant’s contention that a science of psychology was impossible.
Threshold or limen ― Herbart’s conception of a limit below which an idea will be out of consciousness, and conversely, in consciousness when above it.

Social Sciences

Hermann Lotze (1817–1881)
His book, Medical Psychology, was published in 1852 and was the first book ever published to link physiology and psychology.
Lotze was one of the first academics to adopt the modern view of scientists as disinterested observers who carefully weigh all sides of a question.