Fancher, R. E. & Rutherford, A..
Pioneers of psychology (5th edition).
New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.
Science = collective activity focused on the explanation of phenomena of the world
- Explanation, discussion/criticism, reason, empiricism, trust (assumption of honesty vs
truth)
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY: Introductory chapter
(3-20)
➔ why did psychology evolve like this? Because of its historical context
➔ This results in an understanding of how today’s psychologists are influenced by their
context
Reflexivity - How is it possible for the agent and object of a study to be the same?
→ altering self-understanding through historical psychology
Edwin G. Boring - “A history of Experimental Psychology” (1929) - first history of psychology
Robert I. Watson - “A history of clinical psychology” (1953) - organized a community of historical
psychologists
Historiography = the writing of history
Internalism vs. Externalism
Great Man Approach vs. Zeitgeist approach
Presentism vs. Historicism = today as a consequence of past triumphs and failures, vs
recreating the past without tying it to the present
Sophisticated Presentism = omitting the assumption that either the present or the past is
right or “best”
Critical History of Psychology, New history of Psychology
Origin Myth Process (Franz Samelson)
= a triumphant history of psychology which omits its shortcomings
Continuity - Discontinuity Debate = disagreements over the background of terms (ex.
Psychology)
● Sometimes the meaning of a concept changes over time (ex. intelligence)
Indigenization = process whereby local/national contexts affect the development of Psychology
Ex. Western Psychology is indigenized
,→ Are any ideas timeless?
“Psychology has a long past, but a short history” - Ebbinghaus
➔ There is a conceptual continuity between psychology’s long past, its short history and
present
➔ Female and non-white influence on Psych is often neglected due to their societal roles
(“informal participation”, “helping tendencies”), institutional marginalization,
racism/sexism, and the fact that psychology itself was used to justify racist/sexist beliefs
➔ 1970s,1980s (Robert Val Guthrie) contributions of women and P.O.C. started to be
recognized, as well as previous racist/sexist practices
◆ A body of historical literature on how psychology has been used to support
racism
➔ The vastness of Psychology as a field forces writers of history books to select/exclude
Chapter 1 (23-57) - where does knowledge come
from ?
➔ Sophists = teaching rhetoric and public speaking that enabled their students to voice
themselves in the Athenian democratic society
◆ Gorgias: “What is there greater than the word which persuades the judges in the
courts, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly, or at any
other political meeting?”
◆ Socrates: knowing what he does not know, appreciation of truth as opposed to
popularity and convenience; dialogues with his students to encourage them to
discover truth
● Despised writing (incomplete truth), but Plato wrote Socrates’ dialogues
○ → nativism (inborn properties), rationalism (reason)
◆ Gathering knowledge through rationalism = basic
assumption that we gain knowledge by reasoning about it
➔ Socrates → Plato → Aristotle ⇒ established foundations for psychology
➔ Aristotle differed from Plato in his emphasis on systematic observation - “we must honor
truth above our friends” → empiricism
➔ In the School of Athens, Plato pointing to the sky reflects his tendency toward higher,
idealistic realms of reason and ideas, while Aristotle points to the ground to reflect his
empirical touch
,Presocratic philosophers
➔ Around and after 500 BC
➔ Greece was powerful, spread out, proud of themselves and their language → promoted
abstract thought and discussion
➔ Logos = word or reason; Philosophia= love of wisdom
➔ Thales - astronomical and meteorological observations, the absent minded philosopher
➔ Psyche = breath, soul, animation, life, mind; anima
◆ All living things
◆ Obsessed philosophers
Pythagoras’ philosophical paradoxes
➔ His school emphasized the beautiful regularities of mathematics and of their reflection in
the world; mathematics as a form of religion
➔ Heraclitus: “you can never step into the same river twice” - relationship betwen change
and stability
➔ Zeno - infinity (Achilles vs the turtle)
➔ Protagoras - ditched the abstract - “man is the nature of all things” → sophist emphasis
on people, how they can be manipulated and persuaded
Hippocrates - physician, medical discoveries through observation of natural phenomena,
humoral theory; the Hippocratic Oath
Socrates
➔ Differed greatly from the sophists, which is why he was eventually sentenced to death
➔ Very ambiguous figure, the three accounts of him (Aristophanes, Xenophon and Plato)
differ greatly; he was modest, yet loud mouthed, intellectually apt and always challenging
➔ He aimed to help his pupils bring out the knowledge in their psyches
➔ Philosophical nativism - fully formed but forgotten knowledge lies in the psyche,
empirical experience brings it out - “Know thyself”
Plato
➔ Aristocratic family, platon = broad
➔ Academy
➔ What is innate in the human psyche? How does it relate to external sensory experiences
➔ Appearance vs. Ideal forms, which are more real than sensory experience, permanent
◆ Allegory of the cave
◆ The enlightened prisoner is the philosopher
➔ illustrates contrast between conscious experience of reality and objective physical stimuli
that cause the experiences
, ➔ Mind has 3 components: appetite, courage (horses in chariot metaphor) and reason
(driver); the dominant component defines one’s role in society → innate
◆ Freud developed this into the description of the soul as composed of id, ego and
superego
➔ His political views were that oligarchy would be the best form of government - a society
ruled by elite with innate powers of reason
Aristotle
➔ he had an inclination toward naturalistic observation due to his father being a physician,
revered Hippocrates; not aristocratic, he had grown up at the macedonian court
➔ Systematic observations of natural history
➔ He tutored Alexander Macedon
➔ Created his own school Lyceum
➔ Knowledge acquisition:
◆ Observation
◆ Classification
◆ ⇒ Taxonomy
◆ The mind was the organizer of ideas and knowledge, rather than the origin
➔ Peri Psyche
◆ Scale of nature in terms of psyche complexity
◆ Vegetative soul - only nourishment and reproduction, then locomotion, sensation,
memory, imagination ⇒ sensitive soul + reason = rational soul
◆ The mind is a blank slate, on which stimuli imprint memories
◆ The psyche categorizes memories and empirical experiences, which then is
useful when describing a subject
➔ While he did establish that humans do things because of the psyche, he didn’t go into
why the psyche does these things.
Democritus - atomic theory, combatted the notion that every event had to have a
purpose (Aristotle); later supported by Epicurus - one should not conduct their life in fear of
capricious gods, but instead as tranquilly as possible in the pursuit of socially responsible
happiness ( a self-sufficient life, free from pain and fear, with friends), since all life and the
psyche is just but collections of material atoms.
Islamic Pioneers
Al Kindi
● House of Wisdom
● Commentaries on Aristotle
● Indo-Arabic numerals
,Alhazen
● Theory of visual perception, optics, based on experimental method and observation
● Camera obscura
● Psychological phenomena - depth perception, moon illusion
Avicenna
● Physician
● Medicine should be based on experimental theories
● Building on Aristotle
○ Exterior vs interior senses
○ Appetition - impulse and energy to approach desirable things and avoid
undesirable ones
● Floating man - self-awareness is innate to the human soul, evidence for the existence of
the mind and soul independent of the body
Chapter 2 (59-97) - mind and body? Nature vs
nurture?
Where does knowledge come from? External sources or innate? Is the mind passive or active in
searching knowledge?
Descartes
➔ Mind is separate from the body; building on Aristotelian writings on the psyche; he asked
why the psyche is sensitive (where Aristotle had stopped)
➔ The mind and the body are interacting but different entities
➔ Simple natures - cannot be doubted - only extension and motion can explain every
phenomenon
◆ He was trying to discover “axioms” (which could not be doubted) outside
mathematics, in the material world
➔ World is made of particles, air is like a blind person’s cane when it comes to explaining
vision
➔ Bodies are machines, where nerves are tubes filled with animal spirit (smallest particles),
every function of the body previously defined is performed automatically → emphasized
the centrality of the brain as a sensory organ and executive - reflex, unconditioned and
conditioned
➔ Method
◆ Wealthy, well educated
◆ His education made him have doubts due to contradictions in his education →
The only thing he knew is that he could doubt everything he knew; how do we
know what is true, real?
, ● Senses can deceive
● Analytic geometry
● Doubting everything until you find axioms, from which you draw
conclusions, from which further conclusions can be drawn,
● In doubting the reality of his senses, he realized that his only certainty
was the doubt itself - the only reality he could be sure of was that of his
doubting thoughts, ergo i think therefore i am (echoing Avicenna’s floating
man experiment)
● His thinking, rational soul, undoubtedly real, was untied to the material
body; the rational soul could not be completely sensed → dualism
● Mathematical axioms, perfection, unity, infinity were other concepts that
could not be sensed → innate ideas (echoing plato’s nativism)
○ He extrapolated this to show the existence of god (that embodies
perfection)
➔ View of the mind (dualism)
◆ Interactive because the body and mind work together in a person
➔ Correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia - she asked how can a material body interact
with the immaterial mind?
◆ The body gives the mind’s consciousness the richness of stimuli, the mind
provides rationality to behavior.
➔ Alhazen’s optical experiments led him to think that the eyes sense an upside down
image and that the images unite in the brain, before reaching the soul
◆ He believed that this happens in the Pineal Gland, which, swimming in the sea of
animal spirits, modifies the flow of this fluid to the nerves and thus behavior
◆ Passions are also sensed by the pineal gland
➔ His ideas were largely erroneous, but his train of thought was correct and productive
◆ nervous system and brian regulate behavior with physical laws
◆ Reflex = stimulus-response sequence
◆ Passions are both internally and externally stimulated
◆ Nativism and rationalism
Locke
➔ Knowledge comes from associations made based on experience
➔ Lived during the Enlightenment, became a doctor, supportive of the observational
approach; he looked up to fellow scientists, which reinforced his belief in observation as
the best ways for the mind to gain knowledge
◆ Conflicting political ideas → how do we know what is true?
◆ Rejected Descartes’ idea of an always conscious mind and innate ideas
➔ Aristotle - tabula rasa, knowledge is gained through experience
◆ ⇒ the mind is thus a passive receiver of knowledge
◆ Concepts like perfection cannot come to a mind that has not been educated, and
thus are not innate
