Intro & History of Psychology Notes
Week 1
Chapter 1: Foundational Ideas from Antiquity
Greek miracle and pre-Socratic philosophers
● Psyche: breath, animate, soul, what is present in a living entity
● Mathematics and medical knowledge
● Hippocrates: observation, mechanistic explanation of disease (humoral theory)
Socrates
● Where does knowledge come from?
● Philosophical nativism
● Dialogue Meno → knowledge lies within the psyche
● Insight → the mind contains capacities for interpretation that go further than passive
experience of the stimulus
Plato
● How do we get knowledge?
● Nativism (innate properties exist in the mind)
● Plato established the Academy
Aristotle
● Became the first great proponent of empiricism: the notion that true knowledge
comes first and primarily through the processing of sensory experiences of the
external world
Hippocrates
● Hippocratic Corpus: a body of medical writings that regarded diseases as natural
phenomena, rather than the results of some sort of demonic or supernatural influences
○ The Hippocratics proposed a humoral theory → to explain illness as the
result of the imbalance in 4 prominent liquid substances which they called
humors:
, ■ 1: blood → optimistic / cheerful
■ 2: yellow bile → easily angered
■ 3: black bile → melancholy
■ 4: phlegm → calm
Platonic Idealism
● Appearance: a person’s actual conscious experience of something (when we see a
particular tree, horse, or dog)
● Plato believed that behind each appearance was something much more permanent:
ideal forms → representing the essences of all trees, all horses, or all dogs
○ This general view that that is something more fundamental and “ideal” lying
behind everyday sensory experiences is referred to as idealism
● Plato’s allegory of the cave → the shadows that the prisoners see are like Plato’s
appearances and the real events on the other side of the wall are like his ideal forms
Aristotle and Empiricism
● Aristotle was sent to Plato’s Academy at age 17
● Aristotle established the Lyceum
Biological Taxonomy
● Aristotle and Theophrastus marked the beginning of the biological field of taxonomy:
the arrangement of organisms into hierarchically ordered groups and subgroups
On the Psyche
● Aristotle wrote it and argued that living organisms possess psyches that vary in their
degree of complexity → scale of nature: simple plants at the bottom, humans at the
top
● Vegetative soul: nourishment and reproduction → the most fundamental functions of
all psyches
● Sensitive soul: the ability to move, to react to changing stimuli in the environment,
and a capacity to remember and learn from experiences
● Rational soul: the ability to reason → possessed only by humans
, ● Aristotle argued that the human psyche has an innate set of categories into which the
memories and ideas of empirical experiences are classified and organized
Plato and Socrates both regarded the human psyche as a reservoir of innate ideas and forms,
which may be brought out or partially revealed by empirical experiences. Aristotle
emphasized empirical experiences.
Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius
● Democritus: formulated an atomic theory → there is a limit to the divisibility of all
material objects, and that they are ultimately composed of tiny, solid, unbreakable
particles he called atoms
● The atomic theory was attacked because he believed the atomic interactions were
random, and therefore he went against the Greek assumptions about the nature of
causality → every events has to have a purpose
● Aristotle then said that all caused events had to have four essential components:
○ 1: a material cause → the stuff out of which something is made
○ 2: a formal cause → the idea or plan behind the caused thing
○ 3: an efficient cause → the actions that bring the caused thing into being
○ 4: a final cause → the purpose for which the thing is caused
● Epicurus: he admired Democritus’ atomic theory
○ The Epicureans said that the human psyche, along with the body and all other
objects in the universe, are nothing but collections of material atoms → this
remained an unpopular view and disappeared completely, except for the
effects it had on Lucretius
● Lucretius: wrote a poem in favor of Epicurean philosophy (On the Nature of Things)
Three Islamic Pioneers
● Al-Kindi → Introduction of Indo-Arabic Numerals
○ Indo-Arabic numerals: instead of roman numerals (I, V, X, L, etc) they now
had symbols: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
● Alhazen → Modern Visual Science
, ○ Camera obscura: when light enters the box, it projects an inverted image of
the outside scene onto the back wall → Alhazen recognized that something
similar happens in the human eye
● Avicenna → Medicine and the Aristotelian Soul
○ The Canon of Medicine: a summary of everything that Avicenna had
practiced and learned in the discipline of healing
■ Second work of Avicenna → The Book of Healing: it was an
encyclopedia covering everything that Aristotle had discussed (the
book included philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences and an
exposition of the Aristotelian soul)
○ Floating man thought experiment: With no prior experience and with all
sensory organs blocked, would this man have any consciousness of his own
soul or self? → Avicenna’s answer was yes - for him, self-awareness was an
innate capacity of the human rational soul
Europe’s Intellectual Reawakening
● Leonardo Fibonacci: learned about Al-Kindi’s system of Indo-Arabic numerals and
described the Fibonacci sequence → each new number is the sum of the two numbers
that preceded it
Summary
● Socrates believed that the most important sources of wisdom resided inside the
psyches of his pupils, and that his task was to draw knowledge out of them in
conversational dialogues → Socrates was the first great proponent of nativism
● His pupil Plato expanded on this approach when he differentiated between
appearances and ideal forms → allegory of the cave. Plato thought the human
psyche has 3 components: appetites, courage, and reason.
● Plato’s student Aristotle placed greater emphasis on empiricism. Aristotle initiated
the field of biological taxonomy. In his work Peri Psyche (On the Soul), he made a
distinction between vegetative souls, sensitive souls, and rational souls. Aristotle
was also the leader of the Lyceum.
● A contemporary of Socrates, Democritus, proposed the atomic theory → everything
is composed of tiny atoms moving randomly in empty space, and interacting with
each other in unpredictable ways to create material bodies.
