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This is a summary of all the Chapters in the book. Giving a clear overview about the main topics and pioneers.
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Pioneers of PsychologyChapter 1
Plato (424-347 BC) came from a wealthy family in Athens and was schooled mainly by
sophists. Plato, however, wanted a modest teacher and found Socrates (470-399
BC). Socrates claimed that his only special wisdom was that he was aware of much he
didn’t know. He wanted his students to appreciate what was true and permanent instead
of temporary and popular.
He did this by conducting dialogues with his students, to discover their inner capacities
of finding truths. The fact that Plato chose Socrates and, therefore, philosophy still has
consequences to this day. Socrates didn’t leave any written documents of his thoughts
because, according to him, trusting in writing weakened the faculties of memory and
serious thinking. Plato, however, made many written accounts of him: the Socratic
dialogues. These emphasize the importance of the higher capacities of rational thinking
and mathematical reasoning.
The dialogues became the source of nativism - in which the innate is important, opposite
to acquired qualities - and of rationalism, in which reason is emphasized. When Plato
was 30, he founded the Academy, a place where pupils of different ages and interests
could pursue their intellectual goals.
In 367 BC, Aristotle (384-322 BC) arrived at said Academy and became a top student. At
the age of 37, he left again. Aristotle placed much more emphasis than Plato on the
systematic observation of the natural, empirical world of the senses. He became the first
supporter of empiricism - the notion that true knowledge is obtained from sensory
experiences of the external world.
⇧
Who were the pre-Socratic philosophers?
400 years before Plato's time, settlers from Greece spread and collected writings from
wealthy Greek-speaking colonies. These colonies were developed very differently and
had founded different types of governments. The Greeks, however, were all very proud
of their language, and thought of all who spoke a language other than Greek as
barbarians.
Shortly before Socrates began teaching, Protagoras (490-420 BC) claimed that it was
useless to speculate on big questions such as the ultimate nature and layout of the
universe. He was a sophist and focused on purely human experiences and
behaviour. The sophists tried to understand people.
Hippocrates (460-370 BC) is often mentioned as a pre-Socratic, and, like Protagoras and
the Sophists, he dealt with everyday human concerns. However, Hippocrates was mainly
a physicist. He attracted a school of students and followers, called the Hippocrats, who
together produced many medical writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus. In this,
diseases were described as natural phenomena, instead of the result of demons or
supernatural influences. The Hippocrats had a ‘humoral’ theory to explain health and
viewed disease as the result of the disbalance or four prominent fluids in the human
body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and mucus – the Humors. The Hippocrats were
,responsible for some of the ethical, observational medical practices that we still see
today. New doctors, for instance, have to take the Hippocratic Oath, promising to comply
with ethical standards.
⇧
Who was Socrates?
As a young man, Socrates took up the profession of his father, a sculptor, and fought as
a soldier. He married Xanthippe and they had three sons together. He eventually made
the career switch to a teacher which she was not happy about.
Socrates differed from the sophists because he asked little to nothing for his services
and was shabby dressed. In addition to Plato, Xenophon (430-354 BC) was his best-
known student. At the age of 70, Socrates was arrested by a new Athenian government,
and was sentenced to death by drinking poison. Three of his students left descriptions of
him, in which Xenophon described him as admirable and brave.
Socrates' myth about reincarnation and memory is an extreme version of nativism, with
the idea that fully formed but forgotten knowledge lies in the psyche, and it only requires
empirical experiences to get it out. The ability to create abstract ideas lies in the human
mind. According to this view, the path to wisdom is not to add opinions and experiences
from the external senses, but to know yourself and to interpret these experiences the
light of one's innate rational faculties.
⇧
What was Plato’s philosophy?
Legend has it that Plato's birth name was Aristocles, but because he had broad shoulders
and was athletically inclined, he earned the nickname Platon (Greek for broad). Plato
was about 25 when Socrates received the death penalty and died. He then fled from
Athens to Italy but returned at the age of thirty. He founded the Academy there, where
all different types of students were welcome. He was the leader of the school for more
than 40 years.
Plato himself was mostly concerned with the question of what was innate in the human
mind and what the relationship between these innate characteristics and sensory
experiences was. One of Plato's best-known answers to these questions was the
distinction between appearances and ideal forms. An appearance (Greek: phenomenon)
according to him referred to someone's conscious experience of something. Behind these
apparitions, according to Plato, there was something more permanent: general and ideal
forms that represent the essence of all objects.
This is called idealism. One of Plato's most famous examples of idealism is the allegory
of the cave. The reader is asked to imagine a group of prisoners, who are stuck in a cave
with their faces towards the wall. Some men walk by the outside of the cave with some
marionets on sticks, and because of the sunlight, the shadows of these puppets are
projected along the wall of the cave. So, the prisoners only see the shadows on the wall
and not the reality. The shadows are thus the metaphor for Plato's concept of
appearances, and the real events the metaphor for his ideal forms.
However, the story continues, and one of the prisoners is allowed to leave the
cave. Gradually, he gets used to the daylight and learns to understand the relationship
between the shadows and real events that cause them. However, when he comes back
and tries to explain this to the other prisoners, they do not believe him, for all they know
is the shadows on the wall.
,This enlightened prisoner, to Plato, equals to the true philosopher, the one who goes in
search of true knowledge. The prisoners in a cave illustrate a fundamental case for
modern psychology: the relation between conscious experiences of the external world
and the objective nature of the physical stimuli that lead to these experiences.
Plato also claimed that the human psyche or soul consists of three elements: desire,
courage and reason. In another famous metaphor, he presents these three elements as
a charioteer trying to control a carriage drawn by two horses. One horse represents the
desires and pulls in the direction of the fastest physical satisfaction. The other represents
duty and the motivation to respond bravely to threats to the self or society. The
charioteer is the rational component, that must try to lead the horses in such a way that
they work well together.
Plato also believed that every psyche has these three components in different
proportions, creating three general classes in a society. People who are dominated by
the desires form the masses, those who are driven by courage are the soldiers who
protect society, and the small minority dominated by reason is the elite that controls
society. According to Plato, the proportions of the three components were hereditary. He
therefore did not think that democracy was the best form of government. He was more
for an oligarchy, a society led by a selection of elite people.
⇧
Who was Aristotle?
Aristotle was born in Macedonia. His father was a physicist, and the family doctor of the
Macedonian king. At the age of 17, he was admitted to the Academy. The status of
Aristotle's family was much lower than that of Plato. He crossed the sea to Asia, and
came under the patronage of the local king Hermias. Aristotle married the niece of the
king, Pythias.
He was joined by Theophrastus (371-287 BC). They had already met at the Academy,
and he first became Aristotle's student, then his friend. They did the first systematic
observations together. Aristotle’s were of animals, Theophrastus’ of plants.
After a few years Aristotle returned to Macedonia, becoming the tutor of the son of King
Philip, Alexander. At the age of 20, Alexander became king, and his name became
Alexander the Great. After this Aristotle returned to Athens and became the director of
his own school, the lyceum. This school was broader than the Academy, and attracted
hundreds of students, Aristotle wrote down all the results of their studies, so that more
than 150 books were written by him. Many of these books have sadly been lost.
For Aristotle and Theophrastus, there were two essential steps in the accumulation of
knowledge: cautious and extensive observations, followed by systematic classification
into meaningful groups or categories. This became the beginning of stream
taxonomy. For Aristotle, the cautious observation of the empirical world was the starting
point for knowledge, but the mind had to turn these facts into a meaningful system of
organized ideas and abstract concepts. Aristotle wrote his ideas down in his book 'about
the psyche', which sometimes is seen as the first book on psychology.
According to Aristotle, living organisms have psyches that vary in complexity. The lowest
organisms are plants, which have two capacities that distinguish them from dead things:
they feed and reproduce themselves. Nutrition and reproduction were therefore the two
most fundamental functions of all psyches, according to Aristotle. This is sometimes also
called the vegetative soul. The simplest animals have the additional capacity that they
can move – locomotion - and to respond to their environment - sensation. Higher
animals can also remember things and learn from their sensory experiences, the function
of memory. These four functions are called the sensitive soul. The highest function of the
, psyche is only present in humans, which is the possibility to reason. This is called the
rational soul.
According to Aristotle, the human psyche possesses an innate set of categories in which
memories of empirical experiences are classified and organized. These categories include
substance (for example, a rock, a person or any other object), quantity, quality (colour,
shape, etc.), location, time, relationship (larger, narrower, before, after, etc), and
activity, meaning what it does (tell, hit, etc) or undergoes.
In summary, Plato and Socrates saw the human psyche as a reservoir of innate ideas
and forms, which can be revealed or expressed through empirical experiences. Aristotle,
on the other hand, emphasized empirical experiences as the necessary materials that
the psyche processes on the basis of innate categories.
⇧
Who are Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius?
Democritus (460-370 BC) formulated an atomic theory that included a limit on the
divisibility of all material objects, and that they consisted of small, solid, unbreakable
particles called atoms. According to him, atoms have different forms, and the universe
consists entirely of an infinite number of atoms that move in space, the
vacuum. Sometimes they collide and form new combinations, which form all physical
substances in the universe. His atomic theory was attacked because he assumed that
the interactions between atoms were random, which was contrary to the Greek
assumption of causality, meaning that every event has to have a purpose. According to
Aristotle, all events had four components: a material cause (the material of which
something has been made), a formal cause (the idea or plan behind the thing caused),
an efficient cause and the final cause (the purpose for which the thing was made).
Epicurus (341-270 BC) was a supporter of the theory of Democritus. According to
Epicurus, people had to live a self-fulfilling life, free or pain and fear, in the presence of
friends. According to his school, all objects in the universe consisted only of collections of
atoms.
Almost nothing is known about the life of Lucretius (99-55 BC), but he celebrated the
theory of Epicurus in a Latin poem entitled the Rerum Natura (about the nature of
things). This contained the main ideas of Epicureanism in 200 pages, including atomism,
modern hedonism, and the materialistic conception of the soul.
⇧
Who are three Islamic pioneers?
The Islamic Empire arose rapidly in the century after the death of Prophet Muhammad in
632 AD and spread from West India to Spain and Morocco. Al-Kindi (800-871 AD) was
born in Basra in Iraq but moved to Baghdad at a young age. Here he became leader in
the House of Wisdom, the equivalent of a research institute, whose members translated
classical Greek texts into Arabic. Al-Kindi became known as the philosopher of the Arabs,
through his scolarly comments on Aristotle.
He also became known for his mathematical counting system in India, known as the
Indo-Arabic numbers. This has led to important developments in the history of
civilization. 1 to 9 were now displayed as all separate numbers, and the important '0'
was added. This made it much easier to do mathematical calculations than with the
Greek counting system. This also forms the source of the current word ‘algebra’.
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