Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical psychology as a branch of natural science. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and (...) to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. These investigators typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. (shrink)

Some humanist theologians within the French Reformed Church in the 17th century developed the notion that a disability of the intellect could exist in nature independently of any moral defect, freeing its possessors from any obligations of natural law. Sharpened by disputes with the church leadership, this notion began to suggest a species-type classification that threatened to override the importance of the boundary between elect and reprobate in the doctrine of predestination. This classification seems to look forward to the natural (...) history of mind that emerged later in the century. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human art joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transform human nature, and explain at the same time how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough to ask in Scholastic fashion ‘What is man?’ - his essence and unique faculties, his special place in God’s world. A new question took on urgency in the wake of religious (...) reformation, namely ‘What could man become?’ But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as architectonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the way in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiatives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon’s Reformation pedagogy. (shrink)

Emphasis on autonomy of texts presupposes that there are perennial concepts. But researchers' expectations may turn history into mythology of ideas; researchers forget that an agent cannot be described as doing something he could not understand as a description, and that thinking may be inconsistent. They will never uncover voluntary oblique strategies and by treating ideas as units will confuse sentences with statements. On the other hand, a contextual approach to the meaning of texts dismisses ideas as unimportant effects. Neither (...) method shows how what was said was meant is crucial for understanding. There are no perennial problems; philosophers of different times do not speak directly to us. But history of ideas helps us recognize the contingency of many of our beliefs. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul, conceived as an animating power that included vital, sensory, and rational functions. C. Wolff restricted the term " psychology " to sensory, cognitive, and volitional functions and placed the science under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers (...) placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. By the end of the century there was a flourishing discipline of empirical psychology in Germany, with a professorship, textbooks, and journals. The practitioners of empirical psychology at this time typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. Accordingly, psychology as a natural scientific disciplines was not invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but *remade* from the extant empirical psychology. (shrink)

L’histoire de la psychologie en tant que discipline autonome comporte non seulement des développements méthodologiques et institutionnels, mais aussi l’élaboration du concept même de psychologie et des représentations de sa place dans l’ordre des sciences. Si de telles représentations ne détenninent pas la constitution du champ professionnel ou la pratique concrète du psychologue, elles n’en expriment pas moins des idéaux épistémologiques et reflètent les changements qui s’opèrent au sein de la discipline. Nous donnerons d’abord une vue générale de la position (...) de la psychologie au XVIIe et au VXIIIe siècle, puis nous esquisserons l’histoire de sa place dans l’ordre des sciences de Destutt de Tracy à Jean Piaget. Après avoir été la science des sciences des classifications hiérarchiques, la psychologie s’intègre aux autres sciences dans des schémas moins linéaires, voire circulaires, sans pour autant toujours perdre la prééminence gnoséologique et pédagogique que lui attribuèrent en premier les « psychologues » du XVIIIe siècle. (shrink)

This paper discusses the historical voice in the history of the human sci ences. I address the question, 'Who speaks?', as a question about disci plinary identities and conventions of writing - identities and conventions which have the appearance of conditions of knowledge, in an area of activity where academic history and the history of science or intellectual history meet. If, as this paper contends, the subject-matter of the history of the human sciences is inherently contestable because of fundamental differences (...) about the subject, man, how is the field to be shaped as if it were a whole? The meta-narratives that once sustained synthetic writing, such as the teleological narratives of the emergence of a modern discipline or of progress towards truth, have lost authority. I ask whether the alternatives rely on 'wilful' authorial rhetoric, the use of the resources of language to sustain a narrative, the defence of which depends on intelligibility and inclusiveness, not detailed correspon dence to a supposedly independent past. If this is the case, an author's theoretical stance will inevitably be more out in the open - the author will have a 'theoretical voice' - than is common in most mainstream history writing. In the light of this, I reflect on my own effort to write a synthetic history of the human sciences. (shrink)

The British Psychological Society having established a ‘Philosophy and History’ section, a fresh look at the nature of the History of Psychology is called for. In this paper, I would like to make a contribution to this by raising some conundrums which have yet to be adequately addressed. First, though, what has happened in the History of Psychology so far? Psychologists have been writing histories of their discipline since the turn of the century; Baldwin's History of Psychology appeared in 1913, (...) for example, and the first volume of G. S. Brett's trilogy of the same title in 1912, a year which also saw Dessoir's Outlines of the History of Psychology translated into English. This early work was clearly aimed at providing a respectable genealogy for the nascent discipline; only about a fifth of Baldwin's work actually deals with experimental or empirical Psychology dating from later than the mid-nineteenth century, while Brett treats scientific approaches virtually as a coda to a survey of the history of the philosophy of mind. Psychology is presented as the legitimate heir to the main western philosophical tradition, sired on it, so to speak, by physiologists such as Helmholtz, Muller and Broca. In 1929, E. G. Boring published the first edition of his A History of Experimental Psychology, which dominated the field for decades along with Gardner Murphy's Historical Introduction of Modern Psychology of 1928, a lighter weight work but with a somewhat broader range, which served as an introductory text. Both went into subsequent editions, the latter as recently as 1972 . The series The History of Psychology in Autobiography, begun in 1930 and now in its seventh volume , contains professional autobiographies by the ageing eminent of varying levels of self-disclosure, wit and informative value. It is not, however, until the 1960s that a self-conscious sub-discipline calling itself ‘History of Psychology’ emerges within Psychology, being pioneered by the late R. I. Watson in the United States. New histories begin appearing, including Kantor's very positivistic The Scientific Evolution of Psychology Vol. 1 of 1963 and Hearnshaw's A Short History of British Psychology of 1964. In 1965, the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences was started, formally signalling the arrival of the new sub-discipline on the scene. Subsequent events warrant a more critical appraisal. (shrink)

During the Scientific Revolution one important gauge of the quality of reformed natural philosophical knowledge was its ability to produce a more effective medical practice. Indeed, it was sometimes thought that philosophers who pretended to possess new and more potent philosophical knowledge might display that possession in personal health and longevity. René Descartes repeatedly wrote that a better medical practice was a major aim of his philosophical enterprise. He said that he had made important strides towards achieving that aim and, (...) on that basis, he offered practical medical advice to others and advertised the expectation that, taking his own advice, he would live a very long time. This paper describes what Cartesian medicine looked like in practice and what that practice owed to the power of modernist Reason. (shrink)

The ArgumentPsychology has been frequently subjected to the criticism that it is an unreflexive science — that it fails to acknowledge the reflexive properties of human action which influence psychologists themselves as well as their subjects. However, even avowedly unreflexive actions may involve reflexivity, and in this paper I suggest that the practices of psychology include reflexive ones. Psychology has an established tradition of silence about the self-awareness and sell-consciousness of its actors, whether those actors are experimenters, theorists, or participants (...) (subjects) in research, yet this silence has been established and maintained through sophisticated exercises in self-regard — through sustained reflexive work. Historical analysis reveals some of the ways in which psychologists recognized and then neglected, covered over, or denied reflexivity. Study of those instances where psychologists have engaged in self-conscious reflection or have attended to the sell-consciousness of research subjects indicates both the dangers of reflexivity to governing investigative practices and the resilience which psychology has built against reflexive work. Canonized procedures for scientific work reproduce selves of experimenters and subjects alike, selves who acknowledge only part of their reflexive engagements. Historians of psychology have a special opportunity (and obligation) to explore the reflexive dynamics of investigative practices, and, hence, to theorize aboutscientists, along with their actions and interactions, just as we theorize about science, its products, and its evolution. (shrink)

Whatever its merits and difficulties, the concept of logic embedded in much of the "new philosophy" of the early modern period was then understood to supplant contemporary views of formal logic. The notion of compiling a natural history of the understanding constituted the basis of this new concept of logic. The following paper attempts to trace this view of logic through some of the major and numerous minor texts of the period, centering on the development and influence of John Locke's (...) understanding of the analysis of the cognitive faculties as the discipline of logic. (shrink)

Challenges the revised standard historiography on Wundt as a psychologist. Considers the concept of psychology as a natural science. Examines the relations between psychology and philosophy before and after 1900. Reflects on the notion of disciplinehood as it affects historical narratives.

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Lowith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the ...

Descartes understood the subject matter of physics (or natural philosophy) to encompass the whole of nature, including living things. It therefore comprised not only nonvital phenomena, including those we would now denominate as physical, chemical, minerological, magnetic, and atmospheric; it also extended to the world of plants and animals, including the human animal (with the exception of those aspects of the human mind that Descartes assigned to solely to thinking substance: pure intellect and will). Descartes wrote extensively on physiology and (...) on the physiology and psychology of the senses. This chapter examines the notions of *physiology* and *psychology* in medical and natural philosophical works of Descartes' day; follows his efforts to bring physiology into his mechanistic idiom; considers the relation between physiology of the animal machine and psychological functions that yield functionally appropriate behavior; goes into his physiology and psychology of vision; and elaborates the tension in Descartes' works between his metaphysically supported micro-corpuscularism and his discussion of the animal machine as an organic unity comprising various functionally and teleologically characterized systems. The chapter draws on Descartes' works in both metaphysics and natural philosophy, including his Treatise on Man (originally published as L'Homme, 1664). (shrink)

Two types of criticism are frequently levelled at the history of ideas in general and the history of political theory in particular. The first is very much that of historians practising in other fields; that it is written as a saga in which all the great deeds are done by entities which could not, in principle, do anything. In it, Science is always wrestling with Theology, Empiricism with Rationalism, monism with dualism, evolution with the Great Chain of Being, artifice with (...) nature, Politik with political moralism. Its protagonists are never humans, but only reified abstractions—or, if humans by inadvertence, humans only as the loci of these abstractions. The other charge, one more frequently levelled by philosophers, is that it is insensitive to the distinctive features of ideas, unconcerned with, or more often ineffectual in its concern with, truth and falsehood, its products more like intellectual seed-catalogues than adequate studies of thought In short it is characterised by a persistent tension between the threats of falsity in its history and incompetence in its philosophy. (shrink)

The chapter places Kant's discussions of empirical and rational psychology in the context of previous discussions in Germany. It also considers the status of what might be called his "transcendental psychology" as an instance of a special kind of knowledge: transcendental philosophy. It is divided into sections that consider four topics: the refutation of traditional rational psychology in the Paralogisms; the contrast between traditional empirical psychology and the transcendental philosophy of the Deduction; Kant's appeal to an implicit psychology in his (...) taxonomy and theory of cognitive faculties throughout the Critique of Pure Reason; and his new definitions of and support for empirical and rational psychology in the Doctrine of Method. (shrink)

Dès sa constitution comme domaine du savoir à la fin du XVIe siècle, la psychologie se divise rapidement en deux tendances d’orientation différente. La première, d’inspiration naturaliste, se situe dans le prolongement du commentaire de la Physica aristotélicienne et se développe principalement dans les universités protestantes de Marburg et de Leyde. Dans ces établissements où règne alors un esprit humaniste, rationaliste et tolérant, se met en place la première forme du dualisme de l’âme et du corps. Mais à la même (...) époque, dans des cercles mystiques et hermétistes, se développe une autre conception de la psychologie dont la méthode interprétative s’inspire de l’exégèse biblique et met en oeuvre des procédés thérapeutiques, cure d’âme et cure magnétique, qui reposent sur l’influence psychologique. (shrink)