Pioneers of Psychology
English Language summary of all chapters in concise bullet points
Book:
• Pioneers of Psychology
• Fifth Edition
• Paperback
• Raymond E. Fancher (Author, York University),
• Alexandra Rutherford (Author, York University)
• ISBN: 978-0-393-28354-9
• 768 pages
Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 – Foundational Ideas from Antiquity
• Chapter 2 – Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz
• Chapter 3 – Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to PenKield
• Chapter 4 – The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant through the Gestalt
Psychologists
• Chapter 5 – Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology
• Chapter 6 – The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy
• Chapter 7 – Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences
• Chapter 8 – American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike
• Chapter 9 – Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner
• Chapter 10 – Social InKluence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer to Milgram and
Beyond
• Chapter 11 – Mind in ConKlict: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Its Successors
• Chapter 12 -– Psychology Gets "Personality": Allport, Maslow, and the Broadening
Field
• Chapter 13 – The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study of Intelligence
• Chapter 14 – Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology
• Chapter 15 – Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Workplace
• Chapter 16 – The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology
,• Chapter 1 – Foundational Ideas from Antiquity
• The early Greeks invented philosophy and first theorized in fields as physics (Thales),
mathematics (Pythagoras), and medicine ( Hippocrates), among others.
• They held that every living organism possesses a psyche, a general life-principle with
various functions. Our word psychology derives from this Greek root.
• Socrates believed 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 question-and-
answer dialogues, rather than to impose it through lectures promoting his own ideas.
• Socrates was the first great proponent of nativism as a philosophy of the mind.
• His pupil Plato differentiated between transient appearances (everyday sensations and
conscious experiences we have of the external world), and the eternal and abstract ideal
forms that lie behind appearances.
• Plato thought the human psyche has three components governing the appetites, courage
and reason, which occur in unequal proportions within different individuals.
• Plato's student Aristoteles placed greater emphasis on empiricism, the observation and
classification of those sensory experiences Plato had dismissed as mere appearances.
• Aristoteles observed countless animals and plants and organized them into a hierachy of
groups and subgroups. In his work Peri Psyche, he attributed just the elementary functions
of nutrition and reproduction to the psyches of plants, and further higher abilities to sense,
to move themselves and sometimes to remember and imagine experiences to animals.
• Rational souls, with the ability to think logically and to organize experience in terms of
innate abstract categories, were, according to Aristoteles, unique to human beings.
• Aristoteles was the leader of a school called the Lyceum, and became the greatest
intellectual authority of his age because he recorded virtually all available knowledge.
• Democritus proposed a radical atomic theory of the physical universe, holding that
everything was composed of tiny, invisible atoms moving randomly in otherwise empty
space, and interacting with one another to create material bodies.
• Later adopted by Epicurus, atomism remained a distinctly minority view and was
condemned as atheistic because of its mechanistic emphasis on random causation.
, • After the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity in Europe, Greek philosophy was regared
as blasphemy and would have been lost if it had not been preserved by Islamitic Scholars.
• Al-Kindi promoted Aristotelian philosophy and introduced the system of Indo-Arabic
numerals, which revolutionized computational mathematics and made possible modern
science.
• Alhazen refined classical theories about light and the optical properties of the eye, laying
important foundations for modern visual science.
• Avicenna codified medical knowledge and amplified Aristotle's conceptions of the soul.
Chapter 2 – Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes,
Locke, and Leibniz
• Descartes's comprehensive system of mental philosophy originated after he developed a
method of doubting everything, in his quest to discover what was ultimately certain and
true.
• The one thing he could not doubt was the reality of his own act of doubting, and therefore
the existence of his own thinking mind, or soul, was unquestionably real.
• He held that the most simple natures constituting the physical world are extended material
particles in motion and interaction, and hypothesized a universe in which the smallest fire
particles concentrate in the center to form the sun, the largest earth particles form the
material bodies, and transparent air particles fill all the spaces in between.
• He concluded that all animal bodies could be explained as physical mechanisms, similar
but more complicated than the mechanical statues he had observed as a young man.
• He provided mechanistic explanations for all the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and
sensitive psyches, laying the foundation for modern neurophysiology, including the concept
of the reflex.
• He saw the mind and body as separate but interacting entities, a position known as
interactive dualism.
• Locke agreed with Descartes that the ultimate units or primary qualities of the physical
universe are extended particles in motion and interaction, and proposed that their impact on
sensory organs leads to secondary qualities, such as sights, sounds, smells, and other
conscious sensations that are sometimes deceptive or illusory.
