Ancient and Enlightenment Philosophy of Mind

The word for the mind changes through time and across cultures.

• Psyche

• Pneuma

• Spirit

• Soul

Who does Socrates train?

Plato

Who founded The Academy?

Socrates.

• Aristotle studies here for 20 years, before building his own school.

What is the name of Aristotles school?

The Lyceum.

Who does Aristotle tutor?

• Alexander, The Great - the prince of Macedonia

Who created the first institution of higher education?

Plato, he founded the Hekademia.

What did Plato write?

• The Republic: The Soul, Ethics, Government.

• The Symposium: The Nature of Love.

• The Apology: Justice and Socrates’ Death.

• Phaedo: Death and Afterlife.

What is the Tripartite Soul?

Attempt at theorizing different parts of the human experience:

1. Reason: Truth, Cognition

2. Spirit: Emotion, Drive

3. Appetite: Desire, Instinct

One soul can not desire something and its opposite simulataneously.

What is Kallipolis

The ideal city-state, where the government mirrors the soul of its citizens.

What is the purpose of myth-making? (Founding myth or Noble lie)

To justify political organizations of power.

E.g., Remus & Romulus.

What is the soul in 300 BC?

• A thing located in our bodies.

• Made of matter.

• The soul should be broken into parts.

Who is Avicenna Ibn Sina?

• Aristotelian Scholar/Healer.

• Court physician.

• First case study of melancholia.

What is melancholia?

Used as an all encompasing word for mental health.

What is the impact of the soul on the body?

• The mind can understand, remember, reason and judge.

• Certain emotions color the bile inside human bodies which likewise influence emotions.

Who is Juan Luis Vives?

• First scholar to study the Psyche specifically and directly.

• Conducted structured interviews.

• Theorized about people’s behaviour and its relationship with their affect

• The FIRST psychologists in academic focus and in daily practice.

Who is Leonardo Da Vinci?

First ot identity cranial nerves and connect them to our experience of sight and smell.

What are the 3 main categories of The Enlightenment?

1. Material technologies.

2. Library technologies.

3. Social technologies.

What are material technologies?

• Proliferation of Books.

• Replicaton of Experiments.

• Sharing of Devices and Instruments.

What are literary technologies?

• Trustworthiness (academic integrity).

• Sharing in failures and successes to build credibility.

• Recording of Experimentation.

What are social technologies?

• Allowing witnesses to observe experiments and equipment.

• Establishment of Societies and Universities for institutional backing.

• Conferences and social relationships with professionals.

Who are some key members of the enlightenment period?

• Bacon: Systematic observation of phenomena.

• Newton: formalize hypotheses and “science”

• Leibniz: calculus & statistics

• Euler: Pi, the most prolific mathematician of all time

• Kant: Western philosophy, epistemology

Who is Descartes?

• “I think therefore I am”

• Mind body dualism

  • The body is a thing of the world, the mind is seperated.

• Humans are born with certain innate ideas bestowed upon them.

Who is Locke?

• Empiricist

• There are not innate ideas, and also no natural order of ideas.

• Compares innate ideas as a founding myth.

Who is Hume?

Relations between ideas and the senses, what is thinking?