Summary Intro. to Psychology and History of Psychology Ch.1-16 all lectures important people

Chapter 1
Foundational ideas from antiquity

Greek miracle and pre-Socratic philosophers
- Wealth and philosophia
- Psyche: Breath, animate, soul
o Present in a living entity and absent in a dead entity
o Reservoir of innate ideas and forms which may be brought out or revealed by
empirical experiences
- Math, medical knowledge
- Hippocrates: observation, mechanistic explanation of disease (humoral theory)

Thales
- Accurate astronomical and meteorological observations, and promoted idea that
water was the most important element in the physical makeup of the cosmos

Pythagorean mathematics and philosophical paradoxes
- Pythagoras: Pythagorean-theory
o For every right triangle the square of the long side (hypotenuse) is precisely
equal to the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides.
- Heraclitus
o Highlighted the relationship between stability and change: “you can never step
into the same river twice”
o Highlighted the idea of unity of opposites: “a road going up is also going down”
depending on the position and direction of someone
- Zeno
o Concept of infinity: “a linear distance has an infinite number of intermediate
points between begin and end”
- Protagoras
o Argued that it was useless to speculate about big question such as the
ultimate nature and makeup of the universe or hypothetical paradoxes
o Focused on human experience and behaviour: “man is the measure of all
things”
 Gorgias approached this first
 How to manipulate and persuade people

The Hippocratic

- Hippocrates
o Everyday human concerns
o He was a physician
- Hippocratic Corpus
o Medical writings
o Regarded diseases as natural phenomena
- Humoral theory
o Explain health and illness as the result of the balance or imbalance among 4
prominent liquid substances
o Humours
 Blood – Sanguine (optimistic/cheerful)
 Yellow bile – Chole (cholera, choleric = restless/easily angered)
 Black bile – Melan (melancholy)
 Phlegm – Phlegmatic (calm/lethargic)

, o People are healthy when humours exist within reasonable balance within
themselves
o Removed excess humours by bleedings and purges. Therapeutic benefits of
herbal and pharmacological substances

The life and thought of Socrates
- Wisdom lay in knowing how much he did not know
- Knowledge lies within the psyche
o Forgotten when reborn, but possible to recall
- Philosophical nativism
o Concepts are already in the brain at birth
- Insight
o Mind contains capacities for interpretation that go further than passive
experience of the stimulus
- “know thyself”
- Xenophon
o Most famous of his students
o First great historians

Plato’s life and philosophy
- Explored Socratic question if what is innate
- Added question what is the relationship between those innate features and sensory
experiences imposed on the psycho from the external world
- Platonic Idealism
o Appearance
 Person’s actual conscious experience of something as when we see
something
o Ideal forms
 Representing essences of all tress, all horses etc.
 View that there exists something more fundamental and ultimate lying
behind every day sensory experience
 Idealism
o Allegory of the cave
 Imagine prisoners in a cave, facing the back wall. On the other side,
men walk with puppets on a stick. The sun shines on them and the
prisoners see the shadows of the puppets on the wall. The prisoners
know what’s going on, only indirectly and incompletely and not in their
full reality.
 The shadows are like Plato’s appearances and the real events
like his ideal forms
- The Platonic Legacy
o Psyche has three basic components
 Appetites (physical gratification)
 Courage (confront difficulties with action)
 Reason (Appreciate underlying realities of the world)
o In each person, three components in different proportions
 Appetites – ordinary masses
 Courage – soldiers
 Reason – elite guardians
 Innate and fixed – nature and heredity

Aristotle and Empiricism
- Theophrastus
o First student

, o Interest in diversity of life forms in the natural world
- First recorded and systematic observation
o Aristotle focused on animals
o Theophrastus on plants

- How do we get knowledge?
o Observation, classification, taxonomy
- Lyceum
o Own school
o Broader in scope
- Biological Taxonomy
o Arrangement of organisms in to hierarchically orders groups and subgroups
- On the Psyche
o Scale of nature
 Hierarchical ordering bounded by simple plants at the bottom and
humans at the top
 Plants:
o Nourish themselves
o Reproduce
 Animals
o Move themselves
o React to changing stimuli in environment
 High animals
o Remember and learn
 Highest animals
o Imagination
 Humans
o Reason
o Vegetative soul
 2 abilities combined
o Sensitive soul
 4 abilities of animals combined
o Rational soul
 To have all abilities and also reason/think logically about remembered
or imagined experiences
o Sensation
 Sensory organs receive impressions or imprints from stimuli that strike
them from outside world that replicates its essential feature
 Becomes basis of memories
o Categories
 Memories and ideas of empirical experiences are classified and
organized
 Substance (what something is)
 Quantity (how many)
 Quality (what shape, colour etc)
 Location
 Time
 Relation (bigger, smaller, before, after etc)
 Activity (what is it doing or undergoing)
o Aristotelian logic
 Fundamental aspect of Western psychology
 How various kinds of subject-predicate statements or propositions
relate to and interact with each other according inferred laws of logic

, Atomic footnote: Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius
- Physical foundations of the universe
o Fire, air, water and earth
- Democritus
o Atomic theory
 There is a limit to the divisibility of all material objects, and that they
are ultimately composed of tiny, solid, unbreakable particles, atoms
o Atoms have differing shapes, universe is entirely made up of an unlimited
number of solid atoms moving about in otherwise empty space, the void.
- Causality
o Every caused event had to have a purpose
- Aristotle
o All caused events had to have four essential components:
o Material cause
 The stuff out of which something is made
o Formal cause
 The idea or plan behind the caused thing
o Efficient cause
 The actions or interactions that bring the caused thing into being
o Final cause
 The purpose for which the thing is caused
- Epicurus
o Adoption atomic theory, one should not fear the irrational or punitive whims of
capricious gods, but should conduct one’s life as tranquilly as possible in the
pursuit of socially responsible happiness
o Epicureans
 Human psyche are nothing but collections of material atoms
o No hedonism, but self-sufficient life free from pain and fear, in the company of
friends
- Lucretius
o Poem (De Rerum Natura) about principles of Epicureanism, including
atomism, moderate hedonism and materialistic conception of the soul

Three Islamic Pioneers
- Islamic empire
o Great scholars with new and revolutionary ideas
- Al-Kindi and Indo-Arabic Numerals
o Al Kindi
 Translated Greek texts to Arabic
 The philosopher of the Arabs
o Indo-Arabic numerals
 Mathematical numbering system that had been developed in relative
obscurity in India
 Numbers from 1 – 9 and 0
 Clear system for performing arithmetical calculations
- Alhazen and Modern Visual Science
o Alhazen
 Book of Optics
 Vision involves rays of light going into the eye
 Based on experimental methods and observations
 Camera Obscura