historyof psych exam 1 pt

Historeography 

• The study of methods and approaches used in the study of history

• “Zeitgeist” versus “great man” approaches

  • How do we study the history of ideas?

    • What were the ‘zeitgeist’ of each era? (for scholars, philosophers, physicians) - different for each context 

      • Pre-socratic Greece

        • Big deal to worry about if you were philosopher → what is nature of the universe, can I trust my perceptions/what underlies what I see (don’t assume what you see is reality), elemental ideas 

      • Classical Greece

        • Where/what is the soul

        • Do animals have souls

        • Is mind and body one?

        • Does universe have a soul?

        • Are souls contained in one another?

        • Reaction to subjective experience that we move and do things (physical) but have some seemingly not physical part of us that directs the physical 

        • Natural order

          • The fittest to rule should do so

          • How do people fit together in society

      • Roman period

        • Concern for people not primarily concerned with soul

          • How to live a good life 

          • Stoicism 

            • Argued good life is life that accepts fate is cause of many things, can’t always do anything about what has happened to you but can determine your reaction

          • Epicureanism

            • Indulgence in moderation is fine, not constant indulgence = self-discipline important

      • Middle ages

        • Theology

          • Christianity dominant in Europe, multiple probs, civilization pop collapses in parts if Europe = lots of knowledge lost

          • Sources/centers of knowledge of Europe in monasteries 

            • Knowledge of Greek lost

        • Practical work of Scholastics is to preserve and transcribe records, interpret what the texts mean

        • First philosophy (metaphysics)

          • Depends on Plato, Aristotle, their works are largely lost

        • Philosophical debates center on religious questions

          • What is nature of deity

          • What is relation of humankind to deity

          • If literal meaning of religious texts should be accepted as real truths 

      • Islamic world

        • More scientific progress

        • Same kinds of religious debates

          • Some willing to challenge literal meaning of religious dogma

        • Large advances in medicine, mathematics, optics 

        • Gradually preservation of Aristotle's work, and Greek = Aquinas can later access Aristotle’s work

      • Renaissance

        • Emergence of expression painting, tackling topics complex in Christianity

        • Advances in science and technology

        • Religious intolerance and wars continue to be significant factors, play out diff in diff parts of Europe

        • Continued strong influence of religion in daily life, now much more difference in religious life compared to middle ages 

      • Enlightenment

        • Veracity of knowledge - how do we know what we know

        • What is nature of man and of society, what should be nature of government

          • Protect rights or impose order by absolute monarch

    • How to survive and thrive 

    • Had luxury of many of us trying to understand the human mind 

  • Who were the ‘great men’ of each era?

    • Pre Socratic philosophers were concerned with the nature of the universe

      • What is the underlying reality?

      • What is the world made of?

      • Has the world been in a constant state or has there been change?

      • Is perception to be trusted?

      • The Hippocratics

        • Hippocrates - physician who attracted a dedicated group of students and followers

        • Hippocratic corpus - extensive medical writings produced by the followers of Hippocrates, in which diseases are regarded as natural phenomena

        • Humoral theory - the theory that health and illness result from, respectively, a balance and an imbalance of humors

        • Humors - four substances within the human body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm

      • Socrates and Plato

        • Socrates - Classical Greek philosopher who engaged his students in dialogues so they could arrive at the truth on their own

        • Nativism - an approach to mental philosophy that emphasized inborn or ‘native’ properties of the mind

        • Rationalism - an approach to mental philosophy that emphasizes the mind’s capacity for reason

        • Platonic idealism

          • Timaeus central ideas

            • World created by perfect deity and ideal world exists and is perfect and eternal

            • From ideal world emerges real world

          • Appearance - Plato’s term for an individual’s actual conscious experience of something

          • Idealism - notion that more fundamental and ideal forms, or essences, underlie our sensory experiences

            • Substances and ideal forms 

          • Allegory of the cave - an example used by Plato to illustrate difference between appearances and ideal forms 

        • Aristotle’s empiricism contrasts with rationalism, idealism of Plato

          • Aristotle - emphasized the importance of systematic observation of sensory experience

          • Empiricism - true knowledge is arrived through sensory experiences of external world

          • Poor biological understanding

            • Thought memory was inscribed on organ of memory - heart, bc heart would speed up or slow down in response to emotion and emotional things likely to be remembered 

            • Thought brain cooled blood 

            • Thought tiny pre-formed human was present in sperm and that women were incubators and they made no contribution 

          • On the Psyche - De Anima - scale of nature, based on souls: vegetative soul (nourishment & reproduction), sensitive soul (locomotion, sensation, memory, imagination), rational soul (reason)

            • Believed everything living had a soul but only humans have rational souls 

          • Ethics 

            • All people have some capacity for ethical behavior but in given sitch may not be free to act ethically 

      • Atomic theory, in primitive form, originated in Greece

        • Democritus - a somewhat younger contemporary of Socrates who developed atomic theory

    • Roman period

      • Galen - humoral theory; brain understanding, vitalist, dissected animals

      • Zeno of Cypress and Epictetus: stoicism (external events are caused by fate and one should accept these calmly; individuals are responsible for their own actions)

      • Neoplatonism adopted by many Christian philosophers 

        • Idea that world is expression of mind of God 

    • Medieval period

      • Medical and psychological inquiry stagnated

        • Knowledge based almost exclusively on theological authority, revelation over reason

      • Scholasticism: wrestling with texts and understanding of deity  in relation to humanity

      • Augustine: memory: images, influenced by emotion; a priori of knowledge of some concepts; memory must be exercised to endure

      • Islam: advances in medicine, optics, debates about observation and reason versus doctrine; preservation of Aristotle’s work, treatment of mental illness 

        • Islamic physicians provided accurate descriptions of the visual system and treatment of mental illnesses

          • Visual anatomy

          • Visual tracts in the brain

          • First asylums in the Islamic world opened in Baghdad

          • Rhazes wrote medical texts, directed Baghdad institutions which became in essense hospital using moral treatment 

      • The rise of European universities and scholasticism

        • Charlemange established schools in every Abbey in his empire

        • Knowledge of Greek had disappeared, except in Ireland’s monasteries (and among Islamic scholars)

      • Thomas Aquinas

        • Deeply committed to reconciling faith and reason

          • Studied Aristotle using Averroes’ translation and commentary

          • Maintain that the church had nothing to fear from empiricism or rationalism

          • Accused of being an ‘Averroist’; ultimately studying Aristotle no longer banned 

      • Roger Bacon

        • Entered Oxford at 13

        • Wrote en epistemology, ethics, optics, language; lectured on Aristotle at Oxford, University of Paris

        • Inspired by Aristotle, argued for direct study of nature

        • Scientific method attributed to him 

      • Invention of printing and widespread impact

        • Spread of printed material

          • Poems, grammars, and first complete Gutenberg Bible

        • Protestant reformation

        • Henry VIII’s challenges to the church 

    • Renaissance

      • Celebration of human in arts

      • Growth in knowledge, mathematics

      • Greater understanding of materialistic determinism of some natural phenomena 

      • What develops in science?

        • Challenges to Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Christianity and Aristotle’s science

        • Cosmology: Ptolemaic system

          • Geocentric, challenged by Copernicus’ observations

        • Galileo and Kepler challenge and overturn the notion of a geo-centric universe

      • Growth of empirical studies continued in many areas

        • Anatomy: dissections of executed criminals

        • Botany: Islamic texts became more widely known, new works in Europe

        • Zoology - animal specimens 

        • Interest grew in quantification and mathematics

          • Math used for practical applications in business and navigation 

      • Knowledge of anatomy

        • Da Vinci: drew dissection of cadavers

          • Optic chiasm; other contributions to understanding vision; musculature

        • Julian Caesar Scaliger

          • Wrote extensively; including about kinesthetic senses

        • Vesalius - public dissection, brain connected to body through nerves, ribs 

          • Male and female humans have same number of ribs - challenges creative narrative

      • Michel de Mintaigne

        • Established the literary form of essays

        • Primary theme is that we cannot be certain of knowledge or reasoning

        • Promoted skepticism particularly about dogma, promoted tolerance 

      • Religious intolerance characterized the era

        • Scientific variance from religious doctrine could be deadly

      • Psychological issues

        • What is the nature of humankind - evil, good, neither

        • What are sources of knowledge

          • Revelation, dosmatic authority, reason, observation

      • Religious and philosophical issues

        • Consistency of materialism with belief in God 

  • Look at clues to determine what people back then were going through 

• Viewing/evaluating  events and persons from current perspectives, versus attempts to capture the contextual perspective

“Four Idols”

• Bacon described four Idols that are impediments to human knowledge

  • Idols of the Tribe are the limits of the human intellectual apparatus

  • Idols of the Cave are the prejudices or preferred theories that blind us to alternative explanations

  • Idols of the Marketplace are aspects of the nominal fallacy

    • We often believe that we have explained a phenomenon by giving it a name

• Idols of the theatre are the tendencies of humans to accept the claims of authorities

Age of Enlightenment

• “Enlightenment”, roughly 1685 to 1815

  • Advances in science, political ideas → have challenges, inspired revolutions around Eruope and Americas

  • Ideas focused on rights of people to self-determination, have liberty and rights protected, state should protect people of the state 

Aristotle 

• Aristotle was a student of Plato who founded his own school, the Lyceum

• Aristotle was an empiricist who approached the problem of causality in four ways (Material, efficient, formal, final)

• Aristotle argued for hylomorphism

  • All material objects are made of matter and form

    • Matter acted upon by many different effective agents 

  • The mind and the body as interdependent

  • Argues causes that arrives from material nature of things, ideal forms that things are embodiments of 

  • Essence of all life is animating principle of soul

• Aristotle attributes to the soul nutritive function, sensitive and movement functions, and, in humans, reason

• What is Aristotle discussing in De Anima

• What does he mean by natural philosophy?

• Affectations of the soul?

  • Ways the soul acted/responded and how it influenced people

• What must the natural philosopher do in studying the soul?

  • Look at interaction of soul with body

  • Has to be an observer of self and others

Aristotle's theories of biology, cognition 

• Aristotle’s view on psychological processes

• Aristotle separated memory, a passive process, and recollection, which is active

• He provided an associationist view of memory

• Aristotle maintained that sense objects cause sensations with a different medium for each sense

• Thinking is rooted in perception, but thinking may be flawed

• Imagination does not have the corrective influence of the external world and allows greater freedom in thought

• Aristotle advocated a naturalistic approach to dreams

  • Dreams reflected day-to-day worries

Atomism

• Anaxagoras (450 BCE) and Democritus (420 BCE) suggest that reality is hidden because the parts are too small to see

• Anaxagoras: natural process make it seem that one substance can change into another

• Nutrition and growth; evaporation

• Everything contains the same stuff so anything can change into anything by being arranged

• Anaxagoras recognizes that living things are unpredictable

• The behavior of living things relies on the material stuff and mind

• “Mind is infinite and self-controlling, and it has been mixed with no thing but is alone by itself”

• Material stud is infinitely divisible, so we can never really know it

• Democritus believed atoms were indivisible

• Variously shaped, entangled, too small to be sensed, holding on to one another

• Again: what we perceive with our senses is not the true, or at least not the complete, reality

• Leucippus also argued for indivisible minute 

Augustine 

• Aurelis Augustine (354 - 430 CE)

• Augustine combined Greek and Christian thought with other theological and philosophical systems

• He described grief, habit breaking, and his perceptions of infant motivation (selfish brutes)

• Memory: images, influenced by emotion; a priori knowledge of some concepts; memory must be exercised to endure

• Augustine’s explorations of psychological topics reflect his Christian theology

• He acted against the values of curiosity, doubt, and openness that would eventually lead to development of scientific inquiry

Averroes 

• Islamic philosopher in the Middle Ages

• Averroes (1126-1198) wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle, conducted research in vision and medicine

• Islamic scholars studying Aristotle

Bacon, Francis 

• Has to do with empiricism

• Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)

• Francis Bacon focused on problems of knowledge

• Bacon described four Idols that are impediments to human knowledge

  • Idols of the Tribe are the limits of the human intellectual apparatus

  • Idols of the Cave are the prejudices or preferred theories that blind us to alternative explanations

  • Idols of the Marketplace are aspects of the nominal fallacy

    • We often believe that we have explained a phenomenon by giving it a name

• Idols of the theatre are the tendencies of humans to accept the claims of authorities

• Bacon emphasized sense experience in the search for knowledge

• He advocated the gathering of observations from a wide variety of sources

• He recommended presentation of these observations to a community of researchers

  • The community could draw tentative conclusions from a wide variety of sources

• Bacon advocated naturalistic approaches to a number of psychological topics including dreams, sleep, human development, thought, and emotion

  • Thought all of these had natural causes 

• (Question) Francis Bacon was

• A British philosopher and scientist who encouraged empiricism

Bacon, Roger 

• Roger Bacon (1220 - 1292, or maybe 1414-1294)

• Entered Oxford at 13

• Wrote on epistemology, ethics, optics, language; lectured on Aristotle at Oxford, University of Paris

• Inspired by Aristotle, argued for the direct study of nature

• Scientific method attributed to him

• May have had a combative personality 

Causality 

• Aristotle was an empiricist who approached the problem of causality in four ways (Material, efficient, formal, final)

• The nature of causality, according to Hume

• We infer causality from the constant repeated conjunction of two events (A occurs, then B; we infer that A causes B)

• If we see one instance of A followed by B, we do not infer causation

• This inductive inference is flawed, but a natural consequence of human reasoning

• He doesn’t deny the existence of causality, but denies that we can understand it

• Hume – associationism, no basis for inference, causality and self are habits of mind

Charles the Great (Charlemagne) 

• The rise of European universities and scholasticism

• Charlemange, in 787 CE, established schools in veery Abbey in his empire

• Knowledge of Greek had disappeared, except in Ireland’s monasteries (and among Islamic scholars)

• 13th and 14th Centuries saw development of true universities

Copernicus 

• The rise of science and mathematics

  • The Copernican Revolution

  • Copernican system 1543 challenged by Tycho Brahe’s system 1573 

  • Nicolaus Copernicus argued for a heliocentric system

• The Copernican revolution increased shere in which natural causes could act

  • Predecible, lawful, and quantifiable forced were at work in astronomy, and these forced threatened extrinsic teleology

• (Question) The philosophical impact of the Copernican revolution was

• Mathematics and physical rules governed natural phenomena

• And mechanical causes of natural phenomena were knowable 

• Copernican revolution moved beyond observation 

  • Recorded position of sun relative to his position on earth, measured position of moon, angles of sun over seasons, changing positions of planets

  • Inferred each and planets moving around sun, developed mathematical explanation

  • Systematic collection of data overtime, production of theoretical explanations in data

Cosmology & Galileo

• Cosmology: Ptolemaic system

  • We come to understand our place in the universe more accurately 

• Astronomers provided evidence to challenge the geocentric cosmology and replace it with heliocentric cosmology

• The geocentric work of Ptolemu was accepted as church doctrine and could not be challenged

• Galileo Galilei refined the telescope and challenged the assumptions of the church

  • The conflict between Galileo and the church was not only a conflict of cosmology

    • It was also a conflict over epistemology

    • The church favored authority as a method of knowledge and forced Galileo to recant his views

• Galileo and Kepler challenge and overturn the notion of a goe-centric universe

  • Galileo (1564 - 1642) is forced to recant

  • Kepler (1571 - 1630) gets away with it (far from Rome)

• Changing cosmology: Copernicus, Galileo

Democritus

• Democritus (420 BCE) suggest that reality is hidden because the parts are too small to see

• Democritus believed atoms were indivisible

• Variously shaped, entangled, too small to be sensed, holding on to one another

• Again: what we perceive with our senses is not the true, or at least not the complete, reality

Empiricism 

• Montaigne’s skepticism challenged Francis Bacon and René Descartes

• Bacon and others responded to Montaigne’s challenge with empiricism

• Empiricism is closest to the term “experience.”

• Empiricists share some common ideas: 

  • A posteriori knowledge

  • A passive mind that responds to sensory input, and 

  • Induction as a method of knowledge

    • Seeing things multiple times

• Bacon and Locke applied empiricism to questions of epistemology

• Berkeley’s radical empiricism

• If all knowledge of the world comes through experience, we cannot validate the existence of anything outside of experience

  • The only real world is the world of experience

  • Existence is defined as being perceived

• Berkeley’s critics asked how the world could be so consistent without a perceiver

  • For Berkeley, consistency implies a continual perceiver, God

  • Therefore, the consistency of the world demonstrates that God must exist

• If all I can know with certainty is my own experience, I may fall into solipsism. Berkeley believed that we could be confident about our experience, because of faith in a constant perceiver

• Berkeley addressed other psychological topics including vision and the relationship between vision and touch

Epictetus 

• Stoicism was influenced by Epictetus

  • Stoicism advocated the calm acceptance of one’s fate and the removal of oneself from appetitive pursuits

• According to him, the only things truly within our control are our thoughts, attitudes, and actions

Epistemology (definition) 

• Epistemology

  • How we learn and know things

  • Learn strictly by experience

  • Have some innate knowledge 

    • Platonic idealism - extreme form that knowledge exists in soul before soul instilled in particular body

    • Born with basic perceptual understanding of space and object properties 

Ethical theory of Aristotle 

• Aristotle views on motivation and ethics

• Aristotle recognized the importance of pleasure and pain in human motivation

  • But he advocated a ‘golden mean’ of action between the extremes

• He recognized four factors that affected human ability to achieve the good

  • Individual differences

  • Habit

    • Develop them over life 

  • Social supports

  • Freedom of choice 

Folk psychology 

• Folk Psychology: everyday way of understanding, or rationalizing, intentional actions in mentalistic terms

• FP understanding is underwritten by capacities to mentalize or “mindread”. On the standard interpretation, mind reading minimally requires: 

  • Representing and attributing mental state attitudes (minimally belief and desire, but possibly other mental states too); 

  • Representing and attributing the contents of such attitudes; 

  • Appreciating how such attitudes structurally interrelate

• FP has set principals that relay to other states of mind = helps rationalize actions in terms of reason

Folk psychology theory 

• What is folk psychology a theory of?

  • How do I relate to you, influence you, predict what’s next

Galen 

• Roman period

• Galen was the most prominent Roman physician

  • Galen accepted the Greek theory of four bodily humors

    • He argued that four qualities (cold, warm, dry, moist) were involved in the balance required for health

  • Mental disorders were also caused by imbalance in the four humors

  • He advocated an early form of psychotherapy to induce balance

  • Galen was a vitalist

    • He accepted three types of pneuma (natural spirit, vital spirit, and animal spirit)

  • The Christian Church assimilated Galen’s ideas as part of church dogma, bt not his emphasis on research

Harvey, William 

• William Harvey 1578 – 1657, British physician

  • Described pumping of blood from heart to lungs and to brain and throughout the body in Du Motu Cordis 1628

    • Arteries move blood away from the heart veins move blood to the heart; “pores” connect arteries and veins

    • Inferred something similar to capillaries existed but didn’t have tech to view them, argued tiny pores connected arteries and veins

  • Skeptical of witchcraft charges; at request of king questioned four women and his testimony led to acquittals

  • Embryology: Exercitationes de generatione animalium published 1651 

    • All life comes from the egg, described development of chick embryos

      • Egg is equivalent to life, important bc life isn’t created out of nothing, no spontaneous generation of life from non-living stuff

      • Medically countered hematogenous theory

    • Disputed the hematogenous theory of Aristotle, based on dissections of hundreds of male and female deer

      • Aristotle argued life comes from the tiny potential human that is in sperm, said sperm is incubated in menstrual blood of women

      • Harvey found ovaries, only human cell visible to naked eye is the human ovum, found these in female deer of various sizes 

      • First scientific explanation of the creation of life 

• (Question) Detailed description of vertebrate reproduction

• Is attributed to William Harvey

Hippocrates 

• Hippocrates was the most famous of the Greek Physicians

• He maintained that balance of the four humors (black bile [melancholy], yellow bile [bitter], blood [aggression, and having more with being jovial and drinking], and phlegm [slow]) was essential for health

• He was the first to classify mental disorders

Hobbes, Thomas 

• British philosopher, influenced by Greek geometry 

• Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679)

• Political philosopher – influenced Locke

• Physics: nature is mechanical, understood through laws of motion

  • Primary qualities = invariant

    • Hobbes thought ‘extent of object’ - amount of space it takes up was only primary quality

  • Secondary qualities = depend on characteristics of observer and under which observation takes place

    • Ex: color

• Social contract—A theory initiated by Hobbes and elaborated upon by Locke and others, that self-interest leads individuals to come together in groups and submit to a centralized authority for purposes of mutual protection

• (Question) Hobbes’ view of human morality was that

• Humans are amoral, aggressive acquisitive with no sense of the rights of others 

Hume, David

• David Hume (1711 - 1776)

• Scottish empiricist

• Helped formalize laws of association by contiguity and similarity and used them in a skeptical analysis of the notion of causality. “Compatibilist” explanation of free will

• For Hume, experience is the primary subject matter of philosophy

• Hume, however, maintained that our experience is simply a chain of events

  • Causality, self, and other relationships are only functions of our mental habits

• Hume distinguished between impressions, mental phenomena that present themselves with force, and ideas, fainter images of impressions

• The nature of the self, according to Hume

• Hume argued that ourselves and our experiences are not as consistent and continuous as we would like to believe

  • The self is constructed and imposed on our memories; it is how we organize the story

• Hume studied the emotions extensively: all derived from pain and pleasure; approval and disapproval are calm forms of love and hate

• He advocated comparative studies in physical anatomy and “anatomy of the mind.” 

• Recap: Hume

• Mechanistic determinism…and..

• Room for an understanding of free will: ‘contingent compatibilism’

Ibn Sena 

• Avicenna wrote extensively on medical topics

  • He struggled to reconcile faith and reason

  • He accepted Galen’s description of four humors and believed that balance was essential

  • He argued for a tripartite soul including the vegetative soul, animal soul, and the human soul 

Islam, Islamic contributions 

• Islamic philosophers in the Middle Ages

• Alhazen (965-1039) studied optics and vision

• Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) believed that God, not nature or cause, explains everything in experience

  • Argued against empiricism and rationalism

• Averroes (1126-1198) wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle, conducted research in vision and medicine

• Islamic scholars studying Aristotle

Juan Luis Vives

• Interviewed people; noting displayed affect and topics discussed; developed an educational theory; influenced Montaigne, perhaps Freud

  • Train child based on how they best learn

  • Focused more on male students 

  • Says trying to teach a disinterested child is of no use 

• Opposed scholasticism: Knowledge comes through observation of evidence, and use of reason is always approximate

  • Faculties of the soul: vegetative, sensitive, cogitative (mind, will, memory

Kepler 

• Galileo and Kepler challenge and overturn the notion of a goe-centric universe

  • Galileo (1564 - 1642) is forced to recant

  • Kepler (1571 - 1630) gets away with it (far from Rome)

• Johannes Kepler refined the Copernican system by introducing elliptical planetary orbits

• Equations described the movement of objects 

Leviathan 

• Leviathan political work addressing the need for a strong government, right of kings

  • State cannot be secure without an absolute ruler

  • State of nature: life is nasty brutish and short, war of all against all

    • Assumed in a state of nature (no organization, no villages)

Locke, John & Materialism

• British elite, thought ab govt 

• John Locke (1632 - 1704)

• Disagreed strongly w/Hobbes 

• Embroiled in religious and political controversies and conflicts

• Essay on human understanding

• Locke argued that the mind is a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) at birth

  • all knowledge is learned through experience; knowledge is only about our ideas

  • sensation - of objects in the external world; reflection - of the mind’s own operations

  • criticized the concept of innate ideas except for existence of self and God

  • Simple ideas - ideas based on the earliest sensations and reflections occurring in infants

  • Complex ideas - ideas produced when simple ideas are combined by the mind

• Locke distinguished between primary and secondary qualities of objects

  • Primary qualities—According to Locke, solidity, extension, figure, and mobility; material objects in the world truly “have” these qualities, which accordingly constitute the fundamental units for constructing a true picture of the world

  • Secondary qualities—According to Locke, the qualities the mind perceives in objects, such as sounds, colors, temperatures, tastes, and odors: characteristics that derive as much from the perceiving sense organs as from the objects themselves

• For Locke, association was a primary characteristic of thought

  • Association of ideas—The linkage of ideas or memories such that the thought of one tends automatically to bring the other to mind

  • Law of association by contiguity—The association of ideas because of the experience of two or more ideas, either simultaneously or in rapid succession

  • Law of association by similarity—The association of ideas because two or more ideas are similar

• Locke on retention of ideas 

• Contemplation – keeping an idea brought into mind actively in view

• Memory – reviving in mind those ideas which have disappeared or “laid aside”; 

  • Memory is the storehouse of ideas

• Locke on operations of mind

• There is no knowledge without discernment

• Comparing

• Compounding – the mind puts together ideas created from sensation and reflection and puts them together to form more complex ideas

• Abstracting – language allows particulars to be combined as universals having the same label

• Locke’s views on freedom and liberty were influential in drafting the US Constitution

• (Question) John Locke’s ideas are reflected in psychology’s concerns with

• Memory and thinking, child development, self-concept, moral intuition and development

  • All

Lucretius 

• Lucretius (dates uncertain 1st C BCE) wrote about a number of psychological topics

  • Argued for the unity of mind and body

  • Advocated atomistic materialism, but allowed room for free will

  • Wrote extensively on sensation, morals, and the evolution of social groups, religion, and language

  • De Rerum Natura

• De Rerum Natura > 7,000 verses

• Proposed a human history

  • Tools of only hands and teeth, followed by rocks and branches, tools of copper, then bronze and iron

  • Huts, followed by mastery of fire, weaving, ultimately city-states

• A theory of biological evolution

• The world operates according to physical law, chance (fortuna), not any deity’s intervention

Mechanism 

• Philosophical and scientific concept that explains natural phenomena in terms of physical causes and processes, often emphasizing the idea that everything in the universe operates like a machine, driven by mechanistic laws

• In philosophy, mechanism often refers to the belief that all natural events and processes, including biological and mental phenomena, can be explained in terms of mechanical interactions between physical parts

• Astronomy, physics, medicine

• Widespread acceptance of mechanistic, materialistic explanations of phenomena

Metaphysics (definition) 

• Branch of philosophy that explores the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and the world beyond what we can observe through our senses

• Deals with questions about what exists, what it means for something to exist, and how the fundamental components of reality are structured

• Metaphysical concerns are questions about

• The nature of existence, reality, time, space

Moral sense philosophy

•  Moral sense theorists believed that humans have an innate sensitivity to moral good and moral deformity…we have an innate sense of natural law, we judge the impact people have on systems of which they are parts

  • Believed we have an inner eye, instinctively recognize something is good or bad 

  • Endownded with a sense of natural good

Naturalism 

• Philosophical view that emphasizes the idea that everything arises from natural causes and laws, and that the world can be understood and explained in terms of natural phenomena, without invoking supernatural or metaphysical explanations

• Belief that all aspects of reality—including the mind, morality, and even knowledge—are grounded in nature and can be studied through the methods of science, reason, and empirical observation

Ontology (definition) 

• Branch of metaphysics in philosophy that focuses on the study of being and existence. It seeks to answer fundamental questions about what exists in the world, what it means for something to exist, and how different kinds of entities relate to each other

• The study of the nature and categories of being, as well as the classification of things in the world

Paleontology 

• Scientific study of the history of life on Earth through the examination of fossils

• Paleontology seeks to understand the structure, behavior, evolution, and interactions of these ancient organisms

Plato's cosmology 

• Plato derives the existence of a creator

• The universe is a thing that has become

  • The universe is visible, tangible and possesses a body

  • If a thing is visible, tangible and possesses a body, then it is perceptible

  • If a thing is perceptible, then it has become

• Anything that becomes is caused to become by something

• The universe has been caused to become by something

• The cause of the universe is a Craftsman, who fashioned the universe after a model

• Plato’s understanding of the physical universe and social world is best described as

  • Idealism

Plato's idealism 

• Platonic idealism - extreme form that knowledge exists in soul before soul instilled in particular body

• Born with basic perceptual understanding of space and object properties

• For Plato, learning is the remembering of the knowledge of forms from before our birth

Ptolemy 

Self and identity 

Skepticism 

Theory theory 

Thomas Aquinas (1255 - 1274)

• Deeply committed to reconciling faith and reason

  • He extensively studied Aristotle

  • He maintained that the church had nothing to fear from empiricism or rationalism

  • Studying Aristotle was no longer banned

• His work was condemned in 1270, 1277; ultimately canonized

• For knowledge of truth, man needs divine help, but can know many things without revelation

• Saw biological change as possible-”corruption of seed”, spontaneous generation

• Very very anti-non procreative sex 

• Thomas Acquinas: What is permissible

• The study of scripture, reason, the study of nature are all valid studies of God

• “Five Ways” statements for the existence of God; consideration of what God is not

  • Not multiple, embodied, finite, occupy space

Timaeus 

• One of the dialogues written by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in which he presents his ideas on the nature of the cosmos, the creation of the universe, and the relationship between the material world and the forms

• Key text in Plato's philosophy, especially in terms of his metaphysical and cosmological views

Utilitarianism 

Vesalius✅