IBP - History of Psychology

IBP - History of Psychology

On this page I collect all the summaries, practice exams and lecture notes for History of Psychology!

You can find the summary of Pioneers of Psychology - Fancher & Rutherford (5th edtition) here!

Booksummary of Pioneers of Psychology by Fancher & Rutherford, 5th edition

Booksummary of Pioneers of Psychology by Fancher & Rutherford, 5th edition


What fundamental ideas from antiquity are there about psychology? - Chapter 1

Plato (424-347 BC) came from a prosperous family in Athens, and was taught by sophists. Plato wanted a modest teacher, this became Socrates (470-399 BC). Socrates claimed that his only special wisdom was that he knew how much he did not know. He wanted his students to appreciate what is true and permanent to the temporary and popular. He did this by conducting dialogues with his students to discover their inner capacities for finding the truth. The choice of Plato for Socrates and philosophy still has consequences to this day. Socrates has not left any written documents of his thoughts because, according to him, trust in writings weakens the faculties of memory and serious thinking. Plato, however, has made many portraits of him: the Socratic dialogues. This emphasizes the importance of higher capacities for rational thinking and mathematical reasoning. The dialogues became the source of nativism, in which the innate is emphasized against acquired qualities, and of rationalism, in which reason is emphasized. When Plato was 30 he founded the Academy, a place where pupils of different ages and interests could come together to pursue their intellectual goals. In 367 BC Aristotle (384-322 BC) arrived at the academy. This physicist became a top student. At the age of 37 he left the Academy. Aristotle placed much more emphasis on the systematic observation of the natural, empirical world of the senses. He became the first supporter of empiricism, the notion that true knowledge is obtained by processing the sensory experiences of the external world.

Who were the presocratic philosophers?

400 years before Plato's time, settlers from Greece spread and collected writings from wealthy Greek-speaking colonies. These colonies developed very differently and founded different types of governments. The Greeks, however, were all proud of their language, and found all who spoke a language other than Greek barbarians. Shortly before Socrates began teaching, Protagoras (490-420 BC) claimed that it was useless to speculate on big questions such as the ultimate nature and layout of the universe. He focused on purely human experiences and behavior. The sophists tried to understand people.

Hippocrates (460-370 BC) is often mentioned as a presocrate, and, like Protagoras and the Sophists, he deals with everyday human concerns, but Hippocrates was a physicist. He attracted a school of students and followers, called the Hippocrats, who together produced many medical writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus. In this, diseases were seen as natural phenomena instead of the result of demons or supernatural influences. The Hippocrats had a humoral theory to explain health and disease as the result of the balance or imbalance of four prominent fluids in the human body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and mucus. The Hippocrats were responsible for responsible, observational medical practices that we still see today. New doctors have to take the Hippocratic Oath, promising to comply with ethical standards.

Who was Socrates?

As a young man, Socrates took over the profession of his father, sculptor, and fought as a soldier. He married Xanthippe and had three sons with her. His wife was not happy that he made the career switch to a teacher. Socrates differed from the sophists because he asked little or nothing for his services, and was shabby dressed. In addition to Plato, Xenophon (430-354 BC) was his best-known student. At the age of 70, Socrates was arrested by a new Athenian government, and was sentenced to death by drinking poison. Three younger contemporaries left descriptions of him. Xenophon described him as admirable and brave. Socrates' myth about reincarnation and memory is an extreme version of nativism, in the notion that fully formed but forgotten knowledge lies in the psyche, and only requires empirical experiences to get it out. The ability to create abstract ideas lies in the human mind. According to this view, the path to wisdom is not to add opinions and experiences from the external senses, but to know for yourself and to interpret these experiences in the light of one's innate rational faculties.

What was the philosophy of Plato?

Legend has it that Plato's birth name was Aristocles, but that he got broad shoulders and was athletic, and therefore got the nickname Platon (Greek for broad). Plato was about 25 when Socrates received the death penalty and died. He then fled from Athens to Italy. He returned to Athens at the age of thirty. He founded the Academy here, where all the different students were welcome. He was the leader of this school for more than 40 years. Plato himself was concerned with the question of what is innate in the human mind and what the relationship is between these innate characteristics and sensory experiences.

One of Plato's best-known answers to these questions was the distinction between appearances and ideal forms. An appearance (Greek: phenomenon) according to him referred to someone's conscious experience of something. Behind the apparitions, according to Plato, there was something more permanent: general and ideal forms that represent the essence of all objects. This is called idealism. One of Plato's most famous examples of idealism is the allegory of the cave. The reader is asked to present a group of prisoners who are stuck in a cave with faces facing the wall. Men walk on the outside of the cave on a path that runs close to the cave with puppets on sticks, and the shadows of the puppets are projected onto the wall of the cave by sunlight. So the prisoners only see the shadows on the wall and not the reality. The shadows are thus the metaphor for Plato's appearances, and the real events metaphor for his ideal forms. The story continues, and one of the prisoners is allowed to leave the cave. Gradually he gets used to daylight and learns to understand the relationship between the shadows and real events that cause them. However, he is not believed when he tries to explain this to the other prisoners. This enlightened prisoner stands for Plato as the true philosopher, who goes in search of true knowledge.

The prisoners in a cave illustrate a fundamental case for modern psychology: the relation between conscious experiences of the external world and the objective nature of the physical stimuli that lead to these experiences.

Plato also claimed that the human psyche or soul consists of three elements: desire, courage and reason. In another famous metaphor he presents these three elements as a charioteer trying to control a carriage drawn by two horses. A horse represents the desires and pulls in the direction of the fastest physical satisfaction. The other person represents duty and the motivation to respond bravely to threats to the self or society. The charioteer represents the rational component that must try to coordinate the horses in such a way that they work well together.

Plato also believed that every psyche has these three components in different proportions, creating three general classes in a society. People who are dominated by the desires form the masses, those who are driven by courage are the soldiers who protect society, and the small minority dominated by reason is the elite that controls society. According to plato, the proportions of these three components were erratic. He therefore did not think democracy was the best form of government. He was more for an oligarchy, a society led by a selection of elite people.

Who was Aristotle?

Aristotle was born in Macedonia. His father was a physicist, and the family doctor of the Macedonian king. At the age of 17 he was admitted to the Academy. The status of the Aristotle family was much lower than that of Plato. He crossed the sea to Asia, and came under the patronage of the local king Hermias. Aristotle married the niece of the king, Pythias. He was joined by Theophrastus (371-287 BC). They had already met at the Academy, and he first became Aristotle's student, then his friend. They started with the first systematic observations. Aristotle did this in animals, Theophrastus in plants. After a few years Aristotle returned to Macedonia, becoming the tutor of the son of King Philip, Alexander. At the age of 20, Alexander became king, and his name became Alexander the Great. After he became king, Aristotle returned to Athens and became the director of his own school, the lyceum. This school was wider than the Academy, and attracted hundreds of students, Aristotle himself wrote down all the results of the studies, so that more than 150 books were written by him. Many of these books have been lost.

For Aristotle and Theophrastus, there were two essential steps in the accumulation of knowledge: cautious and extensive observations, followed by systematic classification into meaningful groups or categories. This became the beginning of the taxonomy. For Aristotle, the cautious observation of the empirical world was the starting point for knowledge, but the mind had to turn these facts into a meaningful system of organized ideas and abstract concepts.

Aristotle wrote his ideas about the mind in his book 'about the psyche', sometimes seen as the first book on psychology. According to Aristotle, living organisms have psyches that vary in complexity. The lowest organisms are plants, which have two capacities that distinguish them from dead things: they feed and reproduce themselves. Nutrition and reproduction were the two most fundamental functions of all psyches according to Aristotle. Also called the vegetative soul in English. The simplest animals have the additional capacity that they can move, locomotion, and to respond to their environment, sensation. Higher animals can also remember things and learn from their sensory experiences, the function of memory. These four functions together are called the sensitive soul. The highest function of the psyche is only possessed by people, and is the possibility to reason. This is called the rational soul. According to Aristotle, the human psyche possesses an innate set of categories in which memories and ideas of empirical experiences are classified and organized. These categories include substance (for example, a rock, a person or other object), quantity, quality (which color, shape, etc.), location, time, relationship (larger, smaller, before, after, etc), and activity - what it does (tell, hit, etc) or undergoes.

In summary, Plato and Socrates saw the human psyche as a reservoir of innate ideas and forms, which can come out or be revealed through empirical experiences. Aristotle, on the other hand, emphasized empirical experiences as the necessary materials that the psyche uses on the basis of innate categories.

Who are Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius?

Democritus (460-370 BC) formulated an atomic theory that included a limit on the divisibility of all material objects, and that they consisted of small, solid, unbreakable particles called atoms. According to him, atoms have different forms, and the universe consists entirely of an infinite number of atoms that move in space, the vacuum. Sometimes they collide and form new combinations, which are all physical substances in the universe. His atomic theory was attacked because he assumed that the interactions between atoms were random, which was contrary to the Greek assumption of causality, which meant that every event had to have a purpose. According to Aristotle, all events caused must have four components: a material cause (the material of which something has been made), a formal cause (the idea or plan behind the thing caused), an efficient cause (the actions or interactions that cause the caused thing ), and a final cause (the purpose for which the thing was made).

Epicurus (341-270 BC) was a supporter of the theory of Democritus. According to Epicurus, people had to live a self-fulfilling life, free of pain and fear, in the presence of friends. According to his school, all objects in the universe consisted only of collections of atoms.

Almost nothing is known about the life of Lucretius (99-55 BC), but he celebrated the theory of Epicurus in a Latin poem entitled De Rerum Natura (about the nature of things). This contained the main ideas of Epicureanism in 200 pages, including atomism, modern hedonism, and the materialistic conception of the soul.

Who are three Islamic pioneers?

The Islamic Empire arose rapidly in the century after the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD, and spread from West India to Spain and Morocco.

Al-Kindi (800-871) was born in Basra in Iraq, but moved to Baghdad at a young age. Here he became leader in the House of Wisdom, the equivalent of a research institute, whose members translated classical Greek texts into Arabic. Al-Kindi became known as the philosopher of the Arabs, through his learned comments on Aristotle. He became known for his mathematical counting system in India, known as the Indo-Arabic numbers. This has led to important developments in the history of civilization. 1 to 9 were now displayed as all separate numbers, and the important '0' was added. This made it much easier to do mathematical calculations than with the Greek counting system. This also formed the source of the contemporary word algebra.

Alhazen (965-1040) lived in Cairo and wrote books on astronomy, mathematical theories of numbers, geometry, and optics and the theory of visual perception. His book of optometry consisted of seven parts, and is still the foundation for visual scientists. He discovered that light from the outside world is reversed through the lens, creating an inverted image on the retina. Alhazen described the geometric properties of light and reflection, the features of the eye as an optical device, the influence of binocular vision for depth perception, and psychological phenomena.

Avicenna (980-1037) was born in the Persian city of Bukhara, and spent most of his adult life in Iran. Avicenna left a personal document that became known for the lack of modesty. He became famous at the age of eighteen because he healed the local sultan with a vague illness, and as a reward he got access to the fantastic library of his patient. Here he learned all the metaphysical writings of Aristotle by heart. At the age of 21 he got a career in which he analyzed and wrote about the work of Aristotle. The Canon of Medicine consisted of 5 volumes about everything that Avicenna had learned about the discipline of medicine. The majority consisted of detailed empirical observations of diseases, and the most effective techniques for curing them. His second monumental work is called 'the book of medicine'. This was about all kinds of subjects that Aristotle had discussed, and was meant to be a cure for ignorance instead of physical illnesses. Avicenna added to the receptive functions of the soul a motivating function, namely the desire. The desire gives the energy to approach desirable objects and avoid undesirable objects. Avicenna also dealt with the rational soul of Aristotle. In his famous thought experiment of the floating man, he asked his reader to present a newly created but fully formed man in an empty space, whose senses are blocked and limbs stuck so that he can neither touch nor move. Avicenna's question: without previously gathered experiences and without sensory organs, is this man aware of his own soul or himself? Avicennna's answer was: yes. For him self-consciousness was an innate capacity of the human rational soul.

Around the year 1000 the contact between the Christian and Muslim world increased. Trade was one of the peaceful practices among the peoples, and in 1100 the Italian Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1240) traveled with his father to North Africa. He learned everything about Al-Kindi's numerical system and became known for the Fibonacci series, in which each new number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. Mixing cultures also took place at locations on or near the borders of Christian and Islamic areas, for example in Toledo, Spain. The first university was founded in Bologna in 1088. The ideas of Aristotle were again appreciated by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

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History of Psychology Workgroup Notes - Psychology Bachelor 1, University of Leiden 2018/19
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