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Essays on the history of psychology
Essays on the history of psychology
Life and works of rene descartes
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Rene Descartes, Herman von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt all played important roles in creating psychology how it is today, by going beyond what the thought processes were at their time and expanding on knowledge. They didn’t look at the world as other’s did, and they didn’t take “no” for an answer. These great thinkers were centuries to decades apart, but their theories combined and collided into the new psychology.
One step, and great contributor to the birth of psychology was Rene Descartes. Descartes was a philosopher born in France in 1596. Descartes was able to live comfortably from money he inherited from his father. He had many interest and talents while studying at a Jesuit school. Descartes enjoyed mathematics, humanities, philosophy, physics, and physiology (Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E, 2012, p.30),
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He was able to disprove the belief system at this time by using first frogs as test subjects. After working on frogs, Helmholtz moved to human subjects. Through his research, he was able to demonstrate “that the speed of conduction was not instantaneous suggested that thought and movement follow each other at a measurable interval and do not occur simultaneously, as had been thought” (Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E, 2012, p. 57).
The only problems with Helmholtz’s research was that there were difference’s in reaction times between test subjects, and Helmholtz himself was only interested in the length time itself (Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E, 2012). Because of the reaction time issues, Helmholtz ended up abandoning his research. The research was later reviewed and picked up again. Helmholtz was a scientist, and was focused on practical knowledge and research. His experiments, even though practical, would lead the way to new psychology to be born when Wilhelm Wundt came along, as well as help future
Psychology represents the field that deals in the study of the ‘mind’ and how acquired experiences get expressed within and without the emotional and physical body. In the analogy of psychology, one of the original and keen researchers of the mind was a mental-scientist; Wilhelm Wundt (Pomerleau, 2008). One of his significant identifiers as a ‘master psychologist’ is his opening of the first dedicated trial psychology laboratory in 1879, held to be a key step in the culmination of the ‘science’ in modern psychology (McLeod, 2008). In his exertions, he defined the dissimilarity between the fields of psychology and the prior invented philosophy. Wundt provided a clearer disambiguation of the mind in a systematic measurement and organized control. He studied in depth the responsive trait of the mind to stimuli, while describing contemplations and sensorial repulsions, bringing forth a sumptuous knowledge on voluntarism.
Belief whether or not the mind and the body are distinct substances have split the philosopher community in two: the dualists and the monists. In this essay, I will discuss how the mind and body are not distinct based on Rene Descartes’ arguments in The Meditations Of First Philosophy. First, I am going to introduce a few of Descartes’ arguments and his position on the matter. Then, I will pick the most appealing argument and put it up against logical reasoning with other philosophers’ points of view. Finally, I am going to conclude how the 17th-century philosopher proposes a fallacious argument which tests his Cartesian dualism theory.
Descartes' formulation of what he calls the “Real Distinction” has proved foundational to our modern concepts of being and consciousness. His contention has irreversibly influenced the fields of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and others while cementing into the popular consciousness the notion of a definite dichotomy between the mind and the body. In this paper, I will flesh out what Descartes' meant by the term “real distinction,” discuss the arguments he uses in its' defense, and then argue myself that this distinction between mind and body (at least as Descartes frames it) goes much too far, and that it is a much more viable probability to believe that mind and body are actually intertwined, one and the same.
The study of psychology began as a theoretical subject a branch of ancient philosophy, and later as a part of biological sciences and physiology. However, over the years, it has grown into a rigorous science and a separate discipline, with its own sets of guidance and experimental techniques. This paper aims to study the various stages that the science of psychology passed through to reach its contemporary status, and their effects on its development. It begins with an overview of the historical and philosophical basis of psychology, discusses the development of the various schools of thought, and highlights their effects on contemporary personal and professional decision-making.
While the philosophical distinction between mind and body can be traced back to the Greeks, it is due to the influential work of René Descartes, (written around the 1630’s) that we owe the first systematic account of the mind/body relationship. When Descartes'
Rieber, R. W. (2001). Wilhelm Wundt in history: the making of a scientific psychology. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
What is the mind-body problem? The mind-body problem is the main question of trying to distinguish between the qualities of the mental and physical (Schulz & Schulz, 2016). Many scholars seemed to always argue about the mind and body as to whether they were separate or essentially the same thing. Descartes decided to tackle this question head on and he came up with some interesting answers to
The development of psychology like all other sciences started with great minds debating unknown topics and searching for unknown answers. Early philosophers and psychologists such as Sir Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin took a scientific approach to psychology by introducing the ideas of measurement and biology into the way an indi...
René Descartes was the 17th century, French philosopher responsible for many well-known philosophical arguments, such as Cartesian dualism. Briefly discussed previously, according to dualism, brains and the bodies are physical things; the mind, which is a nonphysical object, is distinct from both the brain and from all other body parts (Sober 204). Sober makes a point to note Descartes never denied that there are causal interactions between mental and physical aspects (such as medication healing ailments), and this recognition di...
In the late 1800s, psychology was established as an independent discipline. It was the work of Wilhelm Wundt that contributed the most in the field of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established the first psychology laboratory in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany. He studied different conscious experiences in the laboratory (Guardian, 2009). He defined psychology as a science of consciousness or conscious experience. Scientific research methods were used to investigate reaction times. Wundt studied internal mental processes by using experimental methods.
Gradually within the mid-1800s, the scientific field of psychological science gained its independence from philosophy once researchers developed laboratories to look at and check human sensations and perceptions mistreatment scientific strategies. The first two outstanding analysis psychologists
Descartian dualism is one of the most long lasting legacies of Rene Descartes’ philosophy. He argues that the mind and body operate as separate entities able to exist without one another. That is, the mind is a thinking, non-extended entity and the body is non-thinking and extended. His belief elicited a debate over the nature of the mind and body that has spanned centuries, a debate that is still vociferously argued today. In this essay, I will try and tackle Descartes claim and come to some conclusion as to whether Descartes is correct to say that the mind and body are distinct.
In the year 1879, Wilhelm Wundt became the founder of psychology when he established a laboratory to study conscious mind at the University of Leipzig, Germany. While people had been studying human behavior long before that, Wundt was the first to make it an independent science. Using his medically trained background, he dug deeper into the human consciousness to investigate sensations, perceptions, and experience that creates the personal awareness. His research and experiments became the foundation for others to study and build upon.
From 300-400 BC there was a rise in philosophers who wrote topics on psychology, biology, psychology and a host of others. There was Euclid the founder of modern geometry, Archimedes the founder of engineering mechanics who calculated a value for pi which we still use up to this very day and he also invented the first water pump.
The earliest theories of Psychology documented are from a French soldier René Descartes. Descartes woke one night from a dream to find himself interpreting them as meaning his life was going to improve (Fancher, 2006). Although modern psychologists would laugh at the idea, this marked an important turning point in the way in which people of the time thought. Descartes would come to propose a mind-body dualism – a physical and mental realm. This separated the physical and mental states. This theory has been much disputed and rejected, however, it began a style of thinking which inspired others to further research these ideas.