History of modern psychology Essay

Psychologys history cannot be understood adequately without knowing something of philosophys history. All of the important issues that concern moderne psychologists have been addressed by philosophers (2008). I will discuss how the philosophers Descartes, Locke, Hume, torpedo, and Berkley. These individuals life work greatly influenced the development of modern psychology. The End of the Renaissance and the 17th ampere-second brought to history, the man who is sometimes considered the father of modern philosophy, mathematics, physiology and psychology, the great philosopher, Rene Descartes (Goodwin, 2008).Descartes was born in La Haye on March 31, 1596 of Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard. He was one of a depend of surviving children (two siblings and two half-siblings). His father was a lawyer and magistrate, which apparently left little time for family. Descartes mother died in May of the year following his birth, and he, his climb brother and sister, Pierre and Jeanne, w ere left to be raised by their grandmother in La Haye. At around ten years of age, in 1606, he was sent to the Jesuit college of La Fleche.He studied there until 1614, and in 1615 entered the University of Poitiers, where a year later he received his Baccalaureate and License in Canon & Civil Law (2012). Goodwin (2008) summarized that, Descartes was a rationalist, believing that the way to true noesis was through the remainsatic use of his reasoning abilities. Because he believed that some truths Were universal joint and could be arrived at through reason and without the necessity of sensory experience, he was also a nativist. In addition, he was a dualist and an interactionist, believing that mind and embody were distinct essences, but that they had direct influence on each other.It is Descartes who is most likely responsible for many of the themes that came from the late Renaissance that are incorporated into the information of psychology today, but since that time there are many philosophers in the Western tradition that contributed to the formation of psychology as a discipline. Western Philosophers that Contributed to the brass of Psychology as a Discipline John Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704) was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical exploreer. Locke is often classified as the first of the great slope empiricists.Locke, according to Goodwin (2008) is important to psychology as a consequence of the concepts expressed in two of his books, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690/1963) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693/1963) (p. 38). Goodwin (2008) explains upgrade that the former explains Lockes views on how knowledge is acquired, how we as humans come to understand our world (p. 38) and the latter is found on a series of garner to a friend and shows how empiricist thinking could be applied to all aspects of a childs education (p. 38).David Hume was born near Edinburgh, Scotland. David Hume, was an empiricist/associationist that Goodwin (2008) summarizes was known for making a distinction between impressions, which result from signified, and ideas, which he said were faint copies of impressions (p. 59). It is also said that he identified the rules of association as resemblance, contiguity, and cause/effect and he believed that we cannot know causality absolutely, only that certain events occur together regularly (Goodwin, 2008, p. 59). George Berkeley was born in or near Kilkenny, Ireland on 12 March 1685.He was raised in Dysart Castle (Flage, 2005). He was a bishop of the Anglican Church in Ireland and was one thinker that was especially concerned about the materialistic implications of seventeenth-century cognition (Goodwin, 2008, p. 43). Berkeley was one of the three most famous British Empiricists. (The other two are John Locke and David Hume. ). George Berkeley wrote a detailed analysis of visual perception based on empiricist arguments, in the process describing visual phenomena such as conver gence, accommodation, and the effects of the inverted retinal image.He rejected Lockes primary/secondary qualities distinction, and to take materialism, he proposed (subjective idealism) that we cannot be sure of the reality of objects except through our belief in God, the Permanent Perceiver (Goodwin, 2008). Nineteenth-Century Development of the Science of Psychology John Stuart Mill was a child prodigy and one the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century (Goodwin, 2008). Mills politics derived from and contributed to his psychology. As an empiricist, he believed that all knowledge came through experience and that under the proper circumstances, anyone could become knowledgeable.Thus, he favored government support for universal education and was appalled at the traditional side of meat system that favored the landed gentry, an elite minority (Goodwin, 2008). According to Goodwin (2008), He brought British associationism to its zenith and he provided an analysis of sc ientific thinking that guides psychological research to this day. He was a key transition figure in the shift from the philosophy of the mind to the science of the mind. Immanuel Kant agreed with the empiricists that our knowledge is built from experience, and he argued that the more than important question was how the process occurs.Kant derived the fundamental principles of human thought and action from human sensibility, understanding, and reason, all as sources of our autonomy he balanced the contributions of these principles against the ineliminable inputs of external sensation and internal inclination beyond our own control and he strove both to demarcate these principles from each other and yet to integrate them into a single system with human autonomy as both its foundation and its ultimate value and goal (Guyer, 2004).Wilhelm Wundt (18321920) is known as the founder of experimental psychology. He founded the first train of psychology, called structuralism. The main goal o f Wundts school was to analyze the contents of the mind into its basic structural components or elements, using introspection of mental contents as the chief method (Goodwin, 2008).According to Goodwin (2008), Wundt is justifiably considered the first true psychologist of the modern era and although it is difficult to identify a single Wundtian among the early American psychologists, he had a strong influence on the origins of American psychology. Psychology, as a science is rooted in its origin of philosophy. Descartes, Hume, Mill, Berkeley, Locke, Kant, and Wundt were some of the brightest of their time. The development of modern psychology and its many branches would not be possible without the hard work and contributions of these individuals.