Rene Descartes: The Personalist vs. the Naturalist Viewpoint

We can use the word history in so many ways and it can have so many meanings and usages. We often find that using the term history without considering the underlying concepts can be troublesome at best. In some instances we use the word history to articulate an actual event that has happened prior to today. We can also say history to show a timeline that includes a group of events or actions. We try to learn from history but often find ourselves repeating the patterns depending on if we have learned anything previous history, sometimes repeating because we did learn effective uses of past history. We want things to be consistent, in our minds we want to repeat those things that went well and avoid the things that did not. So many things are locked in our minds and psychology is our way of unlocking those thoughts and processes from the mind. What makes us who we are is history; it also makes society what it is. Because we have an understanding of our history it will always influence the present.
The general cultural, social, economic, ethnical, spiritual, political, and intellectual climate within a group of people, a nation or even globally is the zeitgeist. We often see that is changes are brought about by the zeitgeist of the time or as is referenced as “Spirit of the time”. First we must understand, what is a zeighest? This is the key to help us understand if one person can drive a revolution of thought or is it driven by society? If you are trying to figure out the answer to this question you are not alone. If you think in terms of the Personalist viewpoint then your answer would be that the person that creates the idea will drive society towards their thinking or viewpoint. In these cases we might say that some...

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...uld have had the body move. Certain body functions like breathing, reproducing, healing are controlled by the body but can be influenced by the mind. Pain is not something created by the mind and given to the body, our nervous system actually communicated with the body via the mind to control our actions. If there is a misfire or injury we might not find fear, or pain as something the mind might control but only be controlled by natural body functions. The body does not know that fire will burn us, only the mind can value add previous experiences and history to help us remember, or learn a lesson of the pain of fire.

Works Cited

Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Thorne, B. Michael, (1999) Using Irony in Teaching the History of Psychology. Teaching of Psychology. Vol. 26 Issue 3, p222. 3p