NOTEBOOK OF INTRO. TO PSYCHOLOGY & HISTORY
OF PSYCHOLOGY
1. HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND IDEAS FROM ANTIQUITY
WHY THE HISTORY
OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY
HOW TO LOOK AT THE PAST
HISTORIOGRAPHIC METHOD
1. science developments are reaction to different contexts,
understanding that we could be wrong even today,
understanding the progression of a science
2. Psy: long past (constant interest in it) but short history as science
3. to the scribe the past everyone has a perspective (what to esclude)/ has to decide to
describe approaches/ locations/ communities/ recurring ideas/ on individuals(great men)
or groups.
ON THE BOOK THEY DECIDED TO FOCUS ON RECURRING IDEAS:
● Where does the knowledge come from?
● How does the mind work?
● What is the relation between the body and the mind?
● What is the influence of innate capacity and experience?
4. perspective of the book: personalistic-contextual: telling about real people and the
context
,
, CHAPTER1: FOUNDATIONAL IDEAS FROM ANTIQUITY (PP23-57)
greek scholars and followers islamic, at the basis of natural philosophy and
psychological science
where does the knowledge come from:
NATIVISM (socrates, plato) VS EMPIRICISM (aristotels)
● Greek miracle and presocratic: Greece was wealthy so people could be
philosophers. introduced PSYCHE as soul, medical science (Hippocrates did
observation, explanation of disease with humoral theory), mathematics.
● socrate: he believed PHILOSOPHICAL NATIVISM= knowledge lies within the
psyche (“dialogue meno”, asking answers to the a boy to make him discover
knowledge (innate))= he discovered that the mind can interpret beyond the
stimulus given= questions can help to give a new answer. He also believed in
RATIONALISM: the power of reason
● plato: student of socrate,NATIVISM: innate ideal forms that we can understand
es. triangle (abstractions). For him only the human mind has 3 innate parts:
appetites, courage, and reason.
● aristotle: student of plato, EMPIRICISM: knowledge through observation,
classification.
He studies psychology in “Peri Psyche” for him the soul has 4 functions: reason
(humans), imagination and memory (complex animals), sensation and movement
(simple animals), reproduction and nourishment (plants). The human soul
categorizes by substance, quantity, quality, location, time, relation, activity
● atomism: atomic theory of lucretius “de rerum natura” everything is atoms
● During the dark ages the western philosophers dismissed these theories.
● islamic pioneers: Al-Kindi developed indo-arabic numerals. Alhazen “book of
optics” vision thanks to light, discovered with a camera oscura. Avicenna
distinguished between external senses (receive experience) and internal senses
(modify experience)(evaluating, remembering, appetition which is the desire to
approach or avoid), discovered self-awareness (floating man thought experiment)
even without external experience the mind exists independently from the body.
● european enlightenment
CHAPTER2: PIONEERING PHILOSOPHERS OF THE MIND (PP59-97)
how are the mind and body related
are thoughts the result of nature(Leibniz)/ nurture (Locke)/ both
● RENé DESCARTES: mind separated from body.
1. Method: he was well educated and saw contradictions in knowledge, doubted
everything, the senses can deceive so he used geometric methods: doubting,
reasoning individually, selecting true axioms, deducing from them.
