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List of Partners vendors. While the psychology of today reflects the discipline's rich and varied history, the origins of psychology differ significantly from contemporary conceptions of the field. In order to gain a full understanding of psychology, you need to spend some time exploring its history and origins. How did psychology originate? When did it begin? Who were the people responsible for establishing psychology as a separate science?
Contemporary psychology is interested in an enormous range of topics, looking at human behavior and mental process from the neural level to the cultural level. Psychologists study human issues that begin before birth and continue until death. By understanding the history of psychology , you can gain a better understanding of how these topics are studied and what we have learned thus far.
From its earliest beginnings, psychology has been faced with a number of questions. The initial question of how to define psychology helped establish it as a science separate from physiology and philosophy. Additional questions that psychologists have faced throughout history include:.
While psychology did not emerge as a separate discipline until the late s, its earliest history can be traced back to the time of the early Greeks. During the 17th-century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the idea of dualism, which asserted that the mind and body were two entities that interact to form the human experience.
Many other issues still debated by psychologists today, such as the relative contributions of nature vs.
So what makes psychology different from philosophy? Early physiological research on the brain and behavior had a dramatic impact on psychology, ultimately contributing to applying scientific methodologies to the study of human thought and behavior.
During the mids, a German physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt was using scientific research methods to investigate reaction times.
His book published in , "Principles of Physiological Psychology," outlined many of the major connections between the science of physiology and the study of human thought and behavior. This event is generally considered the official start of psychology as a separate and distinct scientific discipline.
How did Wundt view psychology? He perceived the subject as the study of human consciousness and sought to apply experimental methods to studying internal mental processes. While his use of a process known as introspection is seen as unreliable and unscientific today, his early work in psychology helped set the stage for future experimental methods. While his influence dwindled as the field matured, his impact on psychology is unquestionable.
Edward B. Using a process known as introspection, trained subjects would attempt to break down their responses and reactions to the most basic sensation and perceptions. While structuralism is notable for its emphasis on scientific research, its methods were unreliable, limiting, and subjective.
When Titchener died in , structuralism essentially died with him. Psychology flourished in America during the mid- to lates. William James emerged as one of the major American psychologists during this period and publishing his classic textbook, "The Principles of Psychology," established him as the father of American psychology.
His book soon became the standard text in psychology and his ideas eventually served as the basis for a new school of thought known as functionalism. The focus of functionalism was about how behavior actually works to help people live in their environment.
Functionalists utilized methods such as direct observation to study the human mind and behavior. Both of these early schools of thought emphasized human consciousness, but their conceptions of it were significantly different. While the structuralists sought to break down mental processes into their smallest parts, the functionalists believed that consciousness existed as a more continuous and changing process.
While functionalism quickly faded a separate school of thought, it would go on to influence later psychologists and theories of human thought and behavior.
Up to this point, early psychology stressed conscious human experience. An Austrian physician named Sigmund Freud changed the face of psychology in a dramatic way, proposing a theory of personality that emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind. Historians of Western philosophy usually divide the subject into three or more periods, the most important being ancient philosophy , medieval philosophy , and modern philosophy. Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality , existence , knowledge , values , reason , mind , and language.
The origins of Babylonian philosophy can be traced back to the wisdom of early Mesopotamia , which embodied certain philosophies of life, particularly ethics , in the forms of dialectic , dialogues , epic poetry , folklore , hymns , lyrics , prose , and proverbs. The reasoning and rationality of the Babylonians developed beyond empirical observation. There are authors who date the philosophical maxims of Ptahhotep before the 25th century.
Durant claims that Ptahhotep could be considered the very first philosopher in virtue of having the earliest and surviving fragments of moral philosophy i. Persian philosophy can be traced back as far as Old Iranian philosophical traditions and thoughts, with their ancient Indo-Iranian roots. These were considerably influenced by Zarathustra 's teachings.
Throughout Iranian history and due to remarkable political and social influences such as the Macedonian , the Arab , and the Mongol invasions of Persia, a wide spectrum of schools of thought arose. These espoused a variety of views on philosophical questions, extending from Old Iranian and mainly Zoroastrianism -influenced traditions to schools appearing in the late pre-Islamic era, such as Manicheism and Mazdakism , as well as various post-Islamic schools.
Iranian philosophy after Arab invasion of Persia is characterized by different interactions with the old Iranian philosophy , the Greek philosophy and with the development of Islamic philosophy. Illuminationism and the transcendent theosophy are regarded as two of the main philosophical traditions of that era in Persia. Zoroastrianism has been identified as one of the key early events in the development of philosophy.
Thales c. Many, most notably Aristotle , regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition. The study of logic and proof has played a central role in mathematics since the times of Thales Miletus, who is regarded as one of the earliest known mathematicians to offer deductive arguments.
In the Mediterranean region, the concept of an atom was originally proposed by the Phoenician philosopher Mochos of Sidon , who lived in Phoenicia present-day Lebanon some time before the 5th century BC. He originated the philosophy of atomism later associated with Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. Another ancient Greek philosopher greatly influenced by Phoenician philosophy was Pythagoras , who studied in the Phoenician city of Sidon , as well as Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The term Indian philosophy Sanskrit: Darshanas , refers to any of several schools of philosophical thought that originated in the Indian subcontinent , including Hindu philosophy , Buddhist philosophy , and Jain philosophy.
Having the same or rather intertwined origins, all of these philosophies have a common underlying themes of Dharma and Karma , and similarly attempt to explain the attainment of emancipation. They have been formalized and promulgated chiefly between BC to a few centuries AD. India 's philosophical tradition dates back to the composition of the Upanisads [18] in the later Vedic period c. Subsequent schools Skt : Darshanas of Indian philosophy were identified as orthodox Skt : astika or non-orthodox Skt: nastika depending on whether they regarded the Vedas as an infallible source of knowledge.
Competition and integration between the various schools was intense during their formative years, especially between BC to AD. Some like the Jain , Buddhist , Shaiva and Vedanta schools survived, while others like Samkhya and Ajivika did not, either being assimilated or going extinct. In the history of the Indian subcontinent , following the establishment of a Vedic culture, the development of philosophical and religious thought over a period of two millennia gave rise to what came to be called the six schools of astika , or orthodox, Indian or Hindu philosophy.
These schools have come to be synonymous with the greater religion of Hinduism , which was a development of the early Vedic religion. Philosophy has had a tremendous effect on Chinese civilization , and throughout East Asia. The majority of Chinese philosophy originates in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States era, during a period known as the " Hundred Schools of Thought ", [22] which was characterized by significant intellectual and cultural developments. Of the many philosophical schools of China, only Confucianism and Taoism existed after the Qin Dynasty suppressed any Chinese philosophy that was opposed to Legalism.
Confucianism is humanistic , [23] philosophy that believes that human beings are teachable, improvable and perfectible through personal and communal endeavour especially including self-cultivation and self-creation. Confucianism focuses on the cultivation of virtue and maintenance of ethics, the most basic of which are ren , yi , and li. Taoism focuses on establishing harmony with the Tao , which is origin of and the totality of everything that exists.
The word "Tao" or "Dao", depending on the romanization scheme is usually translated as "way", "path" or "principle". Harmony with the Universe , or the origin of it through the Tao, is the intended result of many Taoist rules and practices. Ancient Greek philosophy is a period of Western philosophy, starting in the 6th century [c. It is usually divided into three periods: the pre-Socratic period , the Ancient Classical Greek period of Plato and Aristotle , and the post-Aristotelian or Hellenistic period.
A fourth period that is sometimes added includes the Neoplatonic and Christian philosophers of Late Antiquity. The most important of the ancient philosophers in terms of subsequent influence are Plato and Aristotle. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said of Plato: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. It was said in Roman Ancient history that Pythagoras was the first man to call himself a philosopher, or lover of wisdom, [27] and Pythagorean ideas exercised a marked influence on Plato, and through him, all of Western philosophy. Plato and Aristotle, the first Classical Greek philosophers, did refer critically to other simple "wise men", which were called in Greek " sophists ," and which were common before Pythagoras' time.
From their critique it appears that a distinction was then established in their onw Classical period between the more elevated and pure "lovers of wisdom" the true Philosophers , and these other earlier and more common traveling teachers, who often also earned money from their craft. The main subjects of ancient philosophy are: understanding the fundamental causes and principles of the universe ; explaining it in an economical way; the epistemological problem of reconciling the diversity and change of the natural universe, with the possibility of obtaining fixed and certain knowledge about it; questions about things that cannot be perceived by the senses, such as numbers , elements , universals , and gods.
Socrates is said to have been the initiator of more focused study upon the human things including the analysis of patterns of reasoning and argument and the nature of the good life and the importance of understanding and knowledge in order to pursue it; the explication of the concept of justice , and its relation to various political systems. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many different schools of thought developed in the Hellenistic world and then the Greco-Roman world.
There were Greeks , Romans , Egyptians , Syrians and Arabs who contributed to the development of Hellenistic philosophy. Elements of Persian philosophy and Indian philosophy also had an influence. The most notable schools of Hellenistic philosophy were:. The spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world, followed by the spread of Islam , ushered in the end of Hellenistic philosophy and the beginnings of Medieval philosophy , which was dominated by the three Abrahamic traditions: Jewish philosophy , Christian philosophy , and early Islamic philosophy.
Adi Shankara. The period between 5th and 9th century CE was the most brilliant epoch in the development of Indian philosophy as Hindu and Buddhist philosophies flourished side by side. Advaita ushered a new era in Indian philosophy and as a result, many new schools of thought arose in the medieval period.
Mid-Imperial Chinese philosophy is primarily defined by the development of Neo-Confucianism. During the Tang Dynasty , Buddhism from Nepal also became a prominent philosophical and religious discipline.
It should be noted that philosophy and religion were clearly distinguished in the West, whilst these concepts were more continuous in the East due to, for example, the philosophical concepts of Buddhism. Neo-Confucianism is a philosophical movement that advocated a more rationalist and secular form of Confucianism by rejecting superstitious and mystical elements of Daoism and Buddhism that had influenced Confucianism during and after the Han Dynasty.
However, unlike the Buddhists and Daoists, who saw metaphysics as a catalyst for spiritual development, religious enlightenment, and immortality, the Neo-Confucianists used metaphysics as a guide for developing a rationalist ethical philosophy. Elsewhere in East Asia, Japanese philosophy began to develop as indigenous Shinto beliefs fused with Buddhism , Confucianism and other schools of Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy.
Similar to Japan, in Korean philosophy the emotional content of Shamanism was integrated into the Neo-Confucianism imported from China. In early Islamic thought, which refers to philosophy during the " Islamic Golden Age ", traditionally dated between the 8th and 12th centuries, two main currents may be distinguished. The first is Kalam , that mainly dealt with Islamic theological questions.
These include the Mu'tazili and Ash'ari. The other is Falsafa , that was founded on interpretations of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism.
Islamic philosophy as Henry Corbin describes is a philosophy whose development, and whose modalities, are essentially linked to the religious and spiritual fact of Islam. This description does not suggest that it is necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor even that it is exclusively produced by Muslims. Henry Corbin has divided the history of Islamic philosophy into three periods: the 7thth centuries, the 12thth centuries, and the 18thth centuries.
Theoretical questions were raised right from the beginning of Islam, questions which could to a certain extent be answered by reference to Islamic texts such as the Quran , the practices of the community and the traditional sayings of Muhammad , the Prophet of Islam , and his Companions. This despite the fact that their style and approach are different from those of the Muslim theologians.
Though nothing definite can be said about the beginnings of theology among Muslims, what is certain is that discussion of some of the problems, such as the issue of predestination , free will and Divine Justice , became current among Muslims during the first half of the 2nd century of Islam coincides with 8th century.
Perhaps the first formal centre of such discussions was the circle of Hasan al-Basri d. Mu'tazili theology originated in the 8th century in Basra Iraq by Wasil ibn Ata d.
The first period of Islamic philosophy coincides with Islamic Golden Age. During this time pure philosophical thought is usually used Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism thought as its sources. But it also influenced by Islamic thought and culture. Falaturi has shown in his research that how Hellenistic philosophy diverged in the context of Islamic culture. On the other hand Corbin has shown how mystic aspect of Islam, especially Shia affected philosophy.
This period begins with Al-Kindi and ends with Averroes d. These discussion also helped to rise of rational debates about religion, especially Islam.
Avicenna is one the most prominent figures of this period. He is a thinker who attempted to redefine the course of Islamic philosophy and channel it into new directions. Avicenna's metaphysical system is built on the ingredients and conceptual building blocks which are largely Aristotelian and Neoplatonic , but the final structure is more than the sum of its parts.
Avicenna had become a central authority on philosophy by then. For to the extent that the post-Averroistic tradition remained philosophic, especially in the eastern Islamic lands, it moved in the directions charted for it by Avicenna in the investigation of both theoretical and practical sciences. After the death of Averroes , Islamic philosophy in the Peripatetic style went out of fashion in the Arab part of Muslim world, until the 19th century.
In the Persian-speaking part, Islamic philosophy has continued to follow a largely Illuminationist curriculum, which is introduced by Suhrawardi The third period, according to Corbin, begins in the 16th century after emergence of Safavid dynasty in Persia.
Shah Wali Allah extended Suhrawardi school of thought to the Indian subcontinent. Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages , roughly extending from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance.
The history of western European medieval philosophy is traditionally divided into two main periods: the period in the Latin West following the Early Middle Ages until the 12th century, when the works of Aristotle and Plato were preserved and cultivated; and the "golden age"jjjjjjjjlkjjhkkjhjkjklkkljkljlkjlkjl of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries in the Latin West, which witnessed the culmination of the recovery of ancient philosophy, and significant developments in the field of philosophy of religion , logic and metaphysics.
The medieval era was disparagingly treated by the Renaissance humanists, who saw it as a barbaric "middle" period between the classical age of Greek and Roman culture, and the "rebirth" or renaissance of classical culture.
Yet this period of nearly a thousand years was the longest period of philosophical development in Europe, and possibly the richest. Jorge Gracia has argued that "in intensity, sophistication, and achievement, the philosophical flowering in the thirteenth century could be rightly said to rival the golden age of Greek philosophy in the fourth century B.
Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason , the existence and unity of God , the object of theology and metaphysics , the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation. The medieval tradition of Scholasticism continued to flourish as late as the 17th century, in figures such as Francisco Suarez and John of St. Aquinas, father of Thomism , was immensely influential in Catholic Europe, placed a great emphasis on reason and argumentation, and was one of the first to use the new translation of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological writing.
His work was a significant departure from the Neoplatonic and Augustinian thinking that had dominated much of early Scholasticism. Giordano Bruno. The Renaissance "rebirth" was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought, [46] in which the recovery of classical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism.
The study of classical philosophy also developed in two new ways. On the one hand, the study of Aristotle was changed through the influence of Averroism. The disagreements between these Averroist Aristotelians, and more orthodox catholic Aristotelians such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas eventually contributed to the development of a "humanist Aristotelianism" developed in the Renaissance, as exemplified in the thought of Pietro Pomponazzi and Giacomo Zabarella.
Secondly, as an alternative to Aristotle, the study of Plato and the Neoplatonists became common. This was assisted by the rediscovery of works which had not been well known previously in Western Europe. The Renaissance also renewed interest in anti-Aristotelian theories of nature considered as an organic, living whole comprehensible independently of theology, as in the work of Nicholas of Cusa , Nicholas Copernicus , Giordano Bruno , Telesius , and Tommaso Campanella.
These new movements in philosophy developed contemporaneously with larger religious and political transformations in Europe: the Reformation and the decline of feudalism. Though the theologians of the Protestant Reformation showed little direct interest in philosophy, their destruction of the traditional foundations of theological and intellectual authority harmonized with a revival of fideism and skepticism in thinkers such as Erasmus , Montaigne , and Francisco Sanches.
Chronologically, the early modern era of Western philosophy is usually identified with the 17th and 18th centuries, with the 18th century often being referred to as the Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a seminal figure in initiating reaction against the Enlightenment. The approximate end of the early modern period is most often identified with Immanuel Kant 's systematic attempt to limit metaphysics, justify scientific knowledge, and reconcile both of these with morality and freedom.
Later modern philosophy is usually considered to begin after the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the beginning of the 19th century. After Hegel's death in , 19th-century philosophy largely turned against idealism in favor of varieties of philosophical naturalism , such as the positivism of Auguste Comte , the empiricism of John Stuart Mill , and the materialism of Karl Marx.
Logic began a period of its most significant advances since the inception of the discipline, as increasing mathematical precision opened entire fields of inference to formalization in the work of George Boole and Gottlob Frege.
Within the last century, philosophy has increasingly become a professional discipline practiced within universities, like other academic disciplines. Accordingly, it has become less general and more specialized.
In the view of one prominent recent historian: "Philosophy has become a highly organized discipline, done by specialists primarily for other specialists. The number of philosophers has exploded, the volume of publication has swelled, and the subfields of serious philosophical investigation have multiplied.
Not only is the broad field of philosophy today far too vast to be embraced by one mind, something similar is true even of many highly specialized subfields. In the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school for much of the 20th century.
In the first half of the century, it was a cohesive school, shaped strongly by logical positivism , united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language. The pioneering work of Bertrand Russell was a model for the early development of analytic philosophy, moving from a rejection of the idealism dominant in late 19th-century British philosophy to an neo-Humean empiricism, strengthened by the conceptual resources of modern mathematical logic.
The post-war transformation of the analytic program led in two broad directions: on one hand, an interest in ordinary language as a way of avoiding or redescribing traditional philosophical problems, and on the other, a more thoroughgoing naturalism that sought to dissolve the puzzles of modern philosophy via the results of the natural sciences such as cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. The shift in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein , from a view congruent with logical positivism to a therapeutic dissolution of traditional philosophy as a linguistic misunderstanding of normal forms of life, was the most influential version of the first direction in analytic philosophy.
Quine are influential exemplars of the naturalist approach dominant in the second half of the 20th century. On continental Europe, no single school or temperament enjoyed dominance. The flight of the logical positivists from central Europe during the s and s, however, diminished philosophical interest in natural science, and an emphasis on the humanities, broadly construed, figures prominently in what is usually called " continental philosophy ".
The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl , sought to study consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective, [93] [94] while Martin Heidegger drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to propose an unconventional existential approach to ontology. In the Arab-speaking world Arab nationalist philosophy became the dominant school of thought, involving philosophers such as Michel Aflaq , Zaki al-Arsuzi , Salah al-Din al-Bitar of ba'athism and Sati' al-Husri.
These people disregarded much of Marx's research, and were mostly concerned with the individual's spirituality which would, in the fight against imperialism and oppression, lead to a united Arab Nation. The early Islamic philosopher Ibn al-Haytham is considered a pioneer of phenomenology , or the study of consciousness from a first-person perspective. He articulated a relationship between the physical and observable world and that of intuition , psychology and mental functions.
His theories regarding knowledge and perception , linking the domains of science and religion, led to a philosophy of existence based on the direct observation of reality from the observer's point of view.
Edmund Husserl 's phenomenology was an ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. In the first part of his two-volume work, the Logical Investigations , he launched an extended attack on psychologism. In the second part, he began to develop the technique of descriptive phenomenology , with the aim of showing how objective judgments are indeed grounded in conscious experience—not, however, in the first-person experience of particular individuals, but in the properties essential to any experiences of the kind in question.
He also attempted to identify the essential properties of any act of meaning. He developed the method further in Ideas as transcendental phenomenology , proposing to ground actual experience, and thus all fields of human knowledge, in the structure of consciousness of an ideal, or transcendental , ego.
Later, he attempted to reconcile his transcendental standpoint with an acknowledgement of the intersubjective life-world in which real individual subjects interact.
Husserl published only a few works in his lifetime, which treat phenomenology mainly in abstract methodological terms; but he left an enormous quantity of unpublished concrete analyses. Phenomenology later achieved international fame through the work of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger formerly Husserl's research assistant , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Indeed, through the work of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl's focus on subjective experience influenced aspects of existentialism.
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