Discover the Historical Roots of Psychology

Psychology's Roots in Greek Philosophy and Early Modern Thinkers

• "Psyche" + "logia" refer to the Greek origins of the term "psychology"
• Socrates' approach to mental philosophy was nativism, emphasizing innate properties of the mind
• Plato emphasized the distinction between "Appearances" and Ideal Forms, and founded The Academy as a site of learning and teaching
• Aristotle promoted systematic observation of sensory experience and developed the idea of a hierarchical scale of nature, including the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls
• Rene Descartes promoted a mechanistic, scientific analysis of the nervous system and brain and introduced the idea of mind-body dualism
• John Locke was a strong empiricist who rejected Descartes' innate ideas and believed that experience leads to the formation of knowledge and understanding
• Gottfried Leibniz rejected Locke's strict empirical approach and believed in innate capacities of the mind, including apperception and self-awareness
• Franz Gall proposed the idea of brain localization, correlating brain size/health with mental function, but made many incorrect associations between brain areas and psychological traits
• Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens introduced the idea of studying brain function by cutting out parts of it to observe changes in function
• Immanuel Kant distinguished between the noumenal and phenomenal world, and believed in innate intuitions such as space, time, and quantity
• Johannes Muller promoted the law of specific nerve energies, which states that different nerves convey different information, and rejected the idea of vitalism
• Hermann Helmholtz distinguished between sensation and perception, and challenged some of Kant's ideas about innate qualities, while Gustav Theodor Fechner sought a quantitative relationship between the physical and psychological worlds in his book, "Elements of Psychophysics."