CHIP 24-25 Lecture 1-transcript PDF

SPEAKER 0 Recording. So technical issues aside. So one of the downsides of, of changing rooms is that coats has a little light that tells me is it on isn't it. No time this year. So I just have to sort of go with it. Um, but technical issues aside, here we are ready to study conceptual and historic...

SPEAKER 0 Recording. So technical issues aside. So one of the downsides of, of changing rooms is that coats has a little light that tells me is it on isn't it. No time this year. So I just have to sort of go with it. Um, but technical issues aside, here we are ready to study conceptual and historical issues in psychology. So purpose of today's lecture is to give you a bit of an overview of the course, and then start to cover some of the lecture content on ancient Greece and the relationship between the mind and body. So purpose of the course overall is to understand the historical and philosophical assumptions that psychologists make about the mind. The mind is perhaps one of the most interesting things that we can study, so it's also one of the most difficult as well. So I believe it Stanislav Andress um, who critiqued social sciences such as psychology. And one of the reasons for that is because one of the reasons why it's so hard is you are using your mind to to study and understand the mind. But psychology as a scientific discipline is relatively new, so it didn't really become its own thing until about 1850, 1860 or thereabouts. So it's a subject that, as um, von Heping has put it, it's a subject with a short history and a long past, and that long past goes all the way back thousands and thousands of years. And the purpose of this course essentially is to to study that long past, to the point where we get to the history of psychology, understand where it came from, the the assumptions that psychology as a scientific discipline currently makes for better or for worse. And what are the issues associated with them? So in studying certain problems in terms of engaging in scientific practice, what are the issues that emerge from psychology today? So that's the point of course. The other reason to emphasise why this is important is because if we don't understand these these issues, it can go horribly wrong. So the example on the board is from a paper that was published a couple of years ago now, is by a set of economists in America who published in a very prestigious journal called the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or Penis. So they published their penis, um, looking at, um, what they referred to as as feelings, integers. So these are words, questionnaire items that convey a sense of an attitude or a disposition towards a certain word. So if you are feeling like lively or happy or sad. And the reason why this is really weird as a paper is that psychologists, sociologists and other social scientists have been looking at these using these methods for probably over a century now. So you've had these economists come barging in, talking about this methodology without any context or history behind it, and it comes across a bit like, I don't know if I were to fly to to Madrid or Barcelona and then exclaim that I've discovered Spain. It's like the paper itself is really interesting. The data is really exciting, the methodology sound, but the whole way it's framed comes across as just a bit weird. And that's the sort of thing that if you don't really have a sort of appreciation of the history of how these disciplines emerge, you can sort of end up making those mistakes, too. On the other hand, a couple of examples of where the practice of psychology ends up going wrong instead. So these are a couple of papers that were retracted. So retraction is sort of like the ultimate penalty for academic research. So it's where the findings are either so unreliable or there's such severe problems with the paper that the journal that published it says we don't trust it anymore. We can delete it from the record. And these are a couple of examples of papers that were retracted for both for the same reason for for data fabrication. So these are cases where authors or some of the authors were alleged, some of these relating to live court cases, were alleged to have fabricated the data that made up their experiments. And this is an example of where how doing psychological research can go horribly wrong. But there are other instances on a continuum of research practices that are more or less common that pervade psychology today. So when I when I took this, this sort of course, um, about 15 years ago now, it was at the beginning of what is known as the replication crisis, where the the sort of confidence in a lot of psychological research was damaged by the use of practices like p hacking, um, not pre-registering hypotheses, that sort of stuff. Um, and so there are these cases that will cover throughout the module, and especially towards the end of how actually it's not just how we we understand these these issues in theory, but how we use them, how we apply them. That's really important. So there is a reason for studying this, I promise. In terms of the overall structure of the course then. So we're going to start by looking at early considerations of psychological topics. So because psychology didn't become its own subject until quite late on, there are other areas of intellectual thought that considered psychological issues. And we're going to look at those and how those sort of influenced and fed into psychology as we understand it today. Then towards sort of the the second quarter of the lecture series, you look at the emergence of psychology as its own academic discipline in Germany, in America, in the United States, and how that developed over the 19th and 20th century. And then for the final half of the lectures, we're going to then look back in at conceptual debates in psychology. So areas where these influences have influenced psychology, but then also where psychological research informs how philosophers and other thinkers conceptualise these. And the issue of whether psychology is or is not a science. Otherwise, in terms of teaching format. So it's four till six every week, apart from careers week with either myself or Doctor Alexander Coles, who are co-convenor of this module. So you'll have a couple of hours. Hopefully it won't go to two hours because, you know, 6 p.m. is quite late. Um, By myself or Doctor Coles. Apart from Careers Week, which is the week of Halloween. Um, so apart from that, every week you'll have one of us to, um, talking about conceptual and historical issues in psychology if you're a conversion student. Um, you'll also have seminars either with myself, uh, Doctor Coles or Doctor Kieran Leon. Um, so if you're in Group one, we've already met. So. So you've already experienced me. If you're in group two, I'll see you tomorrow. And we'll go over some of the content of the seminars. Apart from that, in terms of the actual lecture content, apart from the lectures themselves, there are materials that will be made available to you on Moodle and what they should look pretty consistent every week. So every week, either on Monday or Tuesday, hopefully Monday you will have access to the lecture slides for each lecture. Um, you'll also have learning objectives, any preparatory reading. So if there's anything that we think might be useful for you to get more out of the lecture, you'll also have practice mcqs that follow the lectures. So to get you ready for some of the assessment as well as further readings too. So the further readings are designed to help you get that extra reading that is needed for the essay. So because a lot of the content that we're going to cover is from philosophers and their primary works, our books, we've been quite prescriptive in terms of the further readings. We suggest to try and manage your workload a bit. So, you know, we're not expecting you to read a 500 page monograph or anything like that. Instead, we will give suggestions for readings that are supposed to help you with the essay. Part from that lecture slides. Lecture videos. If the tech works will be uploaded onto Moodle. Um, by the end of Friday basically. So within 24 hours lecture. So you'll have the lecture videos too. In terms of the preamble bits, so what we're trying to get out from this module, both in terms of key skills and the things that we're going to be assessing you on, are a mixture of sort of knowledge knowledge skills and transferable skills. So in terms of the knowledge that hopefully these lectures will impart, it's an understanding of both the history and the key issues in psychology, how these affect current psychological thinking, but also that for many of these issues there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer. There are a range of different ones, and being able to compare between those. In terms of the assessment, the MCQ is assessing breadth, um, depth MC MC is assessing breadth, the essays assessing depth of knowledge. Within that, many of those key skills are assessed via the essay, which will make up the majority of your marks. So being able to construct and justify an argument, bringing evidence from multiple perspectives so critically evaluating, comparing and contrasting evidence as well as evidence based reasoning. So using arguments, theories, studies to justify your argument and having critical appraisal of the material. So it's not just, you know, blah blah, said X, it might be that that is a particularly strong piece of evidence because it's of certain features of the study. So incorporating critical evaluation alongside the use of evidence. Now in terms of the assessment there are two components to assessment this year. First of which is a 30 question multiple choice exam, which makes up one third of your mark. It will take place in person on exams, so it's done on computer. 30 minute exams are approximately one minute per question. For each question, you have a series of four alternative answers. You select the one that you think is correct. There is no negative marking, so if you guess, you don't get penalised. The questions themselves are drawn from across the lectures. So and by the lectures I specifically mean the content covered in them. So we're not going to assess further reading in the mcqs. It will be the stuff that is on the lecture slides. The remaining two thirds come from an essay exam. Essay exam is one hour for one essay answer that is written in person. You get a choice of six questions from across the lecture material. The six questions are representative in terms of the content covered and will be similar in their breadth and scope, but on different topics. Now, in those essays, you'll you'll be asked to answer a question relating to either an area of the history of psychology or a conceptual issue in psychology, often critically evaluating the evidence either for or against, or to compare between two different approaches, and then answer that as an essay question. In terms of referencing, you know, we don't expect full referencing sections because it's an in-person exam. And that's insane. Um, what we do ask for are in-text citations so that we can signpost where you are citing material, where you're using material. Um, that may either be from the further reading. It may be from from sort of other parts of the Of course. Um, but in terms of referencing, that's usually what we suggest. Um, because it's a way of signposting that without having to go into like a references section or. Otherwise, in terms of those exams, they will occur at some point in January. Um, so either way, I think the week of this might be the eighth or ninth this year, but in those those first few weeks of January, there's a two week exam period in which the exams will take place. They're scheduled for different sessions, so they won't take place one after the other. They could take place on the same day. So 9 a.m. and 1:00. In practice, they tend to be on different days though. The exams are scheduled centrally, so I don't find out any faster than you do when they are. So we will all find out probably about the beginning of December, when those exams are going to be and where you'll be for them. Hopefully, hopefully it was a bit touch and go last year. Those details will be confirmed before the final lecture, which is a revision lecture. So hopefully in the final lecture we can go over some of those admin details and ironed out anything you're not sure about. And the last bit of sort of preamble and admin is the textbooks that we recommend. So there's two in particular that are available both in the library and online as well that we recommend for this course. The first is Thomas Hardy Lee's A History of Psychology, which does a really good job of covering the first three, 4 or 5 lectures also. So for the history of psychology, it's really good at covering those details. It's very in-depth. So it goes beyond the content that we cover in the lectures, as well as reinforcing that. Otherwise, we also recommend Brisbane and Brisbane on historical and conceptual issues in psychology, which gives a very good overview to all of the content in the course, but really good on the conceptual side. So going into issues about sort of philosophy and whether psychology is a science, it's really good for that stuff. So those are the two that we really recommend. And with each lecture will will sort of give notes on what chapters to focus on, what sort of level of detail of reading, because in some cases there might be multiple chapters that are relevant. And, you know, I'm not going to try and snow you under with reading or anything. It's more sort of signposting you to things that you might find interesting. There are other. There are some of the textbooks that might be useful for very specific purposes as well. So, um, Lawson and colleagues, a history of psychology covers many of the same sort of beats as the other two textbooks. But for some issues, particularly around, um, sort of the growth of psychology outside of the West and thinking about some of the issues about decolonisation that goes quite a bit further than than some of the other textbooks, um, particularly the Leahy one. Similarly, Walsh, Walsh and colleagues at Critical History and Philosophy of Psychology, um, is very good at critically analysing and evaluating if the standard paradigm of psychology is and experimental discipline and so forth. Thinking about alternative approaches to psychology. It's really good for that But otherwise, again, like for the main sort of bits, it's covering the same ground. The final one to recommend potentially I think more for sort of wider interest than anything is Watson's the great psychologists. So for specific thinkers that can be really good as a way of teaching the history of psychology, it's very outmoded. So it's very much the old style, which was to to sort of go from, from a sort of chain from, from sort of Plato and Aristotle through to whichever psychologists that are today and try and make this sort of link in a way that, you know, it's sort of from one, one sort of titan of science and thinking to another, which is not really how we teach it anymore, or at least we try not to. But for certain thinkers, it does go into a lot of detail and can be helpful if you're struggling with certain bits on that front. Otherwise, in terms of because you know this, there's all sorts of material that could be relevant and trying to make it so it's a bit more tractable. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is really good for having that sort of breaching between non-technical and slightly more technical information about a lot of the conceptual and philosophical issues will cover. They're written by academics and peer reviewed as well, so that the quality of them is very high. So as a resource, they're really good to to get you started. If there's areas where you'd like to go into that a bit more or you're not sure for some of the historical content, the University of York in Canada has a specific web page that has all of the old papers, from people like Freud and Watson and Skinner that are in the public domain, that that are available for you to access. So for some of these you can access the primary materials. And finally, as I mentioned a few slides ago there's there's Moodle. So Moodle is really good because I've put a bunch of stuff on it. Um, and if you use that that can help you with the further reading for your essays. SPEAKER 1 And breathe. SPEAKER 0 So that's, that's that's the admin out of the way. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to move swiftly on to talking about ancient Greece. Um, and then I'll give you a bit of a break afterwards. So we're going to go over that. Um, and then in the second half we'll look at medieval psychology and the relationship between the mind and the body. So in this part I'm going to look at some of the first sort of introductions of, uh, psychology and psychological thinking into, um, intellectual thought from particularly from ancient Greece, and particularly with a focus on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, looking at how they thought about knowledge and how we acquire it. So how do we learn information? How do we take it in? What processes do we use to do so? How they represented the mind of soul and morality. So do we. We naturally do the right thing or do we? We lean towards evil. And while I'm nattering on about this, um, what I want you to do is have a bit of a think about whether you can see how those those concepts translate into current psychology, or where you can see those from your own experience. So we're going to focus on ancient Greece, the reason for doing so. There's a couple of reasons. The main one is because of the importance of writing in being able to trace the history of psychology. So, you know. Before writing, you've got archaeology. You've got, um, evidence that people can use to understand social structures, political structures, and to an extent, people's behaviour. But it's more difficult to understand the mind. We have to infer it from sort of the actions, the evidence of behaviour that we have available. And if we go back to the beginning of writing, you can already see interest in psychological topics. So writing in many ways is sort of like it's sort of like the Big Bang in thinking about the mind, because writers are writing about either how they perceive other people, how they think about their own minds, um, how they, they attribute certain things for their actions. So from the beginning of writing, you have stuff that is directly relevant to psychology. The other reason is that there are some people that have argued that writing is the reason, essentially, that we have the minds that we do now. So Julian Jaynes argued that the development of writing was one of several catalysts that reshaped sort of our cognition, our mental processes, into the sort of mind that we have now. So without writing, we wouldn't necessarily have consciousness and conscious awareness in the way that we do as, as people. Otherwise, I've put one of his further readings down is really interesting, not just as a as a theory, but also because it's, um, it's not just focussed on on ancient Greece. It takes evidence from different cultures. So from Mesopotamia, from ancient Egypt. So, so if you want to look at sort of the the emergence of the mind in different cultures. It's a really good way of doing so. The other reason for focusing on ancient Greece is although writings available, um, you know, it was emerged in a lot of different places around the same time. The main reason is the preservation of record. So we have a much, much larger amount of ancient Greek texts that survived. And also we have enough of it that we know how much is missing as well. So for certain thinkers like Plato, we have a full record, um, thinkers, thinkers like Aristotle, we have a bit more. So we, you know, we have about 3,040% of their available corpus of texts. But we also know what's missing, too, whereas for other cultures, it's much harder to quantify that. And so that's the other reason for, for electing to focus on ancient Greece as well as its influence on philosophy, which then leads into psychology as well. As the other consideration on top of all of those is um. As well as being influential as well as these records, surviving, is that because it is all beginnings of philosophy, it makes a natural timeline thinking about the mind. So. The one thing to note on terminology is when when thinking about a lot of this older content, the mind itself isn't necessarily a concept. A lot of it's tied up in ideas of the soul. So when we refer to the soul that is referring to the mind as well. So the way that we think about the soul, especially in sort of a Western context, which is tied up with religion, um, emerged much later. So the way that that the Greeks thought about it was in terms of the soul And even some of the sort of earliest examples of ancient Greek writing. You have an idea of these, these sort of different souls that give rise to a rudimentary psychology. So in the Iliad, you have Homer referring to the sort of different souls that recover different functions. You've got psyche, which later became sort of more of what we think towards the mind and the basis for what we describe as psychology. Um, but in Homeric sort of terms, this, this was sort of a life force, but was relatively inert. Otherwise you have other, other souls. So some men are timeless and Norse, which refer to sort of different, um, sort of different functions. So, so you have separation between that, that sort of core fundamental vitality. So the stuff that we use to to stay alive, to our sort of emotions, our goals, our hopes, and then starting to see a the rudiments of an intellectual function which, although didn't really come to the fore in the Iliad over the course of Greek history, became more prominent. There are some things that were absent, in particular consciousness or conscious awareness, that sort of reasoning, those those sort of higher intellectual functions weren't really referred to. But even at the beginning of writing, you have sort of a distinction between different souls that captures some of the core distinctions that we still make in psychology today. So, so say between between feelings and between sort of more baser urges, baser functions and more intellectual ones. These terms weren't static either. So particularly for things like newness that the capacity for those was thought to vary across people. And that changed over ancient Greece. So certainly. Certainly earlier on that was thought to be a capacity that was was isolated to men. But over time that changed and that that that didn't sort of move in a progressive fashion. It was non-linear. So, you know, going over history repeatedly, you see concerns about things like giving women the vote because they, they, they the, the use of that intellectual capacity, that would be so overwhelming that it would lead to mass hysteria or whether women should get access to higher education. These are the sorts of things that that persisted for thousands of years. And you can start to see sort of the origins of them there. Otherwise, apart from that sort of distinction between different souls, you can begin to see some of the beginnings of a lot of philosophical concepts. So particularly how we think about knowledge, which is called epistemology. You can you can see in thinkers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides, the origins of how people thought that we went about acquiring knowledge, particularly sort of the distinction between empiricism and rationalism. So with empiricism, knowledge comes from the world around us. So. So in this instance, I, you know, you're here listening to watching a lecture. So the information is coming to you from a number of different senses, for better or for worse And that is how potentially you are acquiring knowledge about the you know, it might take some repetition. Alternatively, with rationalism, knowledge comes from reason alone. So that might be that it's innate or that requires it can only be a sort of achieved through our sort of our deduction, our processes of reasoning upon information without making reference to our senses. The second part, second part in that is then how that goes from knowledge in an individual to a body of knowledge. So how we go from things that we know to a scientific subject. So how do we build that knowledge? And a lot of this comes down to a guy by the name of Sales of Miletus, who who, Karl Popper argued was sort of the first philosopher of science And the two key innovations that he came up with are critical thinking and naturalism. So rather than it being the information was was written down and regurgitated. Foley's argued that his students should try and build on his work, so they try to improve on the observations, the reasoning that he made. So it's not just a process of reproduction. Instead, it might be reinterpreting. It might be, um, refuting his arguments based on improving, uh, on his his thought processes. The other innovation is naturalism. So not looking to the supernatural, to the the sort of realm of the the gods or the external, but looking to the actual world around us for understanding what we, um, sort of how things work, either that be our. SPEAKER 2 Minds. SPEAKER 0 Or. SPEAKER 2 You know. SPEAKER 0 Like physics or chemistry, that sort of stuff. So. So failure's was was sort of one of the first to really think about the world in those ways. Otherwise, you can start to see the origins of how we think about the mind and the body as well. In particular, you know, is the mind and is everything purely explained by physical matter, or do we need something else to explain it? And do we, you know, are our actions determined by some other cause than our I don't want to say free will, mostly because the ancient Greeks didn't have a clear concept of free will, but through things that we perhaps can control, it's important to make that distinction, because certainly, you know, towards the end of the Greek period, you get some movement towards free will, but you have to be a bit careful with attributing some of these theories, some of these concepts of civic thinkers, for a couple of reasons. One, in many of these cases, we don't actually have the original text, so we know about them because they've been reinterpreted or they've appeared in other people's work. Plato is really good for that. He tended to write about use dialogues where he'd include these, these thinkers like Thalia or Heraclitus, and so that's how we know about them. So it's being interpreted by somebody else. But also then a lot of the a lot of these cases, you can sort of trace between ideas, but the mapping between them isn't perfect. So trying to attribute, say, empiricism to Aristotle, although Aristotle are, you know, very much a strong influence on empiricism. And he looked to the world how that relates to how we think about it, that there are some nuances there. So something to be slightly careful about. The other, the other sort of, I guess, emerging topic that I wanted to talk about in, in, in ancient Greece is, is, I guess, the origins of personality. So I, I'm a personality psychologist by trade and most interest in addictive behaviours. And even going sort of back to ancient Greece, ancient Rome, you can see distinctions between different typologies, different types of people. So in ancient Greece you had classical elements earth, wind, fire, earth, air, fire and water that were thought to be the four basic elements that made up the physical. The That's material universe and one one aspect of, I guess, ancient Greek medicine, but also how they thought about people is that it might be that some people have too many or too few of these classical elements, as they're expressed in humans. So it might be that somebody has too much bio or too much blood, which is why it might be why you use leeches to drain them, to try and heal them. But one key thing about that is that you have the idea that there might be an excess of one, and absence of the other is also thought to influence the types of personality that people had. So in this this sort of, I guess, tetrad of humours, you have four different personality types sanguine, choleric, melancholy and fluid matic. And these all refer to an excess or an absence of certain humours that relate on to these elements. And within these you can sort of see the beginnings of, of a, um, of a theory of personality, certainly of temperament, um, of the sort of different characteristics that certain people have based on, on their biological makeup. So in the case of sanguine, that might be somebody who's who's sort of extroverted or sort of more cheery, um, more perhaps more impulsive, whereas, you know, somebody who is melancholy that that's often associated with sadness, um, of of perhaps being, um, introverted. So. You've got the origins of, of that sort of idea of personality there. And certainly these terms have persisted over time to the point where they are still words that we use today to describe people's personalities. And the idea of a temperament is pretty persistent in psychology, too. So there are models of temperament based on these sort of biological dispositions that are thought to be precursors to personality. So the idea that underlies this is remarkably persistent. Moving swiftly on then. So the final part on ancient Greece, I'm going to focus on three key thinkers that are really core in how we how philosophy develops Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Socrates made a number of contributions, particularly to pedagogy, moral philosophy. So one of the key things that he was interested in was the idea of virtue. What are these virtues? What do they consist of? And? And do we possess them as well? So things like. Like justice, beauty, goodness, these characteristics that are thought to be inherent, perhaps not inherent, but but obtained, inherent or obtainable by people. And Socrates interest was essentially to try and find out what these were. So what he did was he went around ancient Greece asking various experts of the time, so, so sort of the great and the good, um, what they thought these virtues were and what he used as a method which persists this day. That's the sort of Socratic method which was to ask them what what they they thought that these virtues were so that they're sort of original theses. And then he would ask questions, try and tease out further bits of information about those virtues. So trying to deepen understanding of them and hopefully in the idea of producing sort of arguments that will be contradictory. So in terms of epistemology, Socrates didn't think he had that kind of knowledge. He thought he lived in a state of enlightened ignorance or aporia. So he sort of thought he was was the one eyed man in the land of the blind, where he he knew more because he knew he didn't know the answer. And as it turned out, that really pissed a lot of people off. So, um, in times of crisis, he managed to irritate Athenian society to the point where he was put for trial for corrupting the youth of Athens and was forced to commit suicide. So there might be a lesson there Otherwise. Socrates believed that everybody possessed the basic capacity for moral truth, so he was optimistic that people had this capacity. But was less, less sure about the nature of these virtues, but thought that you could use that method to make people aware of of their their sort of having them, even if, you know, the knowledge of them was, was was less clear. Yeah. Move on to you two. Sort of Plato. So Plato is sort of the nexus from which a lot of, of certainly Western philosophy comes. Um, because so much of his work still still persists. He was a student of Socrates, and also because Socrates was illiterate, wrote up a lot of what we know about Socrates to. The place made contributions to all sorts of areas, all sorts of areas of philosophy. In many ways he is father of modern philosophy, or certainly philosophy. Um, but there's a few that I would like to focus on because of their relevance to psychology. Particularly, I want to focus at this point on knowledge, on epistemology. So what is the knowledge that we acquire and how do we go about acquiring it? So Plato was interested in how we know that, say, this thing here in front of me is a light, um, from from anything else or the rest. You know what? What makes this a table? What is the information that we have that makes us know what what something is apart from individual exemplars, our sensory experiences of. And for that, Plato, uh, appealed to what he referred to as forms. So Plato's forms are a sort of an idealised abstraction separate from from our minds. Of an example or an idea. So? So it's an externally, although although not doesn't exist, but an external representation of, say, a circle, a table, a chair. But we don't access them through our sensory experience. We access them through our minds. So this is sort of a precursor to the idea of idealism. So we don't obtain this knowledge from our senses. We we do. So um, through a process, not so much of reason, but through our minds, which is in contact with the forms. So Plato makes a distinction between on toss and phenomena. On toss is the realm of being where these forms reside, whereas phenomena is sort of the external world, you know, the world we live in, which has stuff in it. And in the case of, say, a cat or a dog, these are these these are phenomena, these are instances of a particular but that doesn't correspond to knowledge of the form. Instead, we have to use sort of processes of reason. We have to use our minds to obtain this knowledge, which is what is known as rationalism. So we use our minds to obtain true knowledge. There is, of course, one exception to that. I mean the these are two perfect idealised dogs because they're mine. So given that, we can ask how did we actually acquire that knowledge? And for Plato, essentially, although we we do so through our minds, it's not through a process of reason per se. Instead, Plato's argument was was sort of a nativism. We are in built with that knowledge, as Plato argued, that we have an immortal soul, that that can transition from body to body over time, and our body houses the soul for a time. But when we die, that moves on to somebody else. They reincarnate. And that knowledge is is persistent. And over time we recreate that. So, so Plato argued for sort of an early form of reincarnation. There was a hierarchy. You start off with men at the top, then you go down to women and then the rest of the animals. So depending on on sort of how things work out in life, you may move and either move up or down that chain. But that knowledge is innate. And over time we may uncover that knowledge through our reasoning processes. Additionally, Plato sort of. Developed conceptualisation of the soul. Moving on from sort of the Homeric content we covered a few slides ago. So Plato came up with a tripartite theory of the soul, which distinguish between the epitome of spirited and rational. So a key thing with Plato's theory is that all organisms have all of these. They may be expressed in different ways, but they are common to all creatures. He makes this distinction between the sort of the basic the the, the, the primal sort of drives of things like needing to access food, mating water, that sort of thing, versus sort of lower psychological functions. So our emotions, our feelings and then our intellectual processes, which is where this sort of model is expanded in much greater detail. So there are some similarities with sort of Homeric ideas. So certainly the spirited soul is known as timeless in this and is very similar in its sort of composition structure. The main difference is the intellectual side is much more developed. So. So Plato's conceptualisation of this is much richer, much more detailed. The other interesting thing on that, why it's doing this today, I don't know. Um, the other the other thing on that is the Plato's ideas about the soul are a precursor to a number of sort of areas of psychology. So particularly that sort of debate between, I guess, the head and the heart, but also as a tripartite model maps on quite closely to, to Freud's theory of personal personality. So sort of aid ego, superego. Even though Freud didn't actually cite Plato as an inspiration for his model, the relationship between them is pretty close. Now, the reason for that is because Freud despised philosophy, um, but otherwise very similar sort of approach. Last philosopher on the cover on this section before you get a bit of a break, because I think we are all a bit done at this point. This is the most intense part of the course, I promise. Um, is Aristotle, who was Plato's student as as Plato was to Socrates and was an important part of Athenian society, or the, I guess, Greek society. He ended up as tutor to Alexander the Great. Um, the key area where Plato and Aristotle differed was on matters of how we acquire knowledge. So whereas Plato in many ways is a sort of precursor to rationalism. Aristotle is the same to empiricism. So rather than looking to our minds to, to, um, to reject the world around us. Instead, Aristotle says that we should use the information from our senses as the basis to formulate knowledge. And so a lot of his work, um, was involved in making detailed observations that that were influential to sort of biology, zoology, psychology as well. The other thing is that the Aristotle differed on on what the forms were. So instead Aristotle made a distinction between different causes the material and the formal, which captures some of the core elements of Plato's sort of theory that he disagreed with, which are sort of what a thing is made from what it actually is. So material cause is the material that the stuff that say Bust of Aristotle is made of. In this case, that's marble. The formal cause, what it is. So the form of that is a is a bust specifically of the philosopher Aristotle, how it came to be the efficient cause. So it was made by somebody. It didn't just come out of the sky. It was it was made by somebody who spent time to create that image. And the final cause, the purpose for which exists, which may be to for public viewing a museum, it might act as a magnet, as a sort of like a paperweight. It could act as the end of a bookshelf, whatever. And although Aristotle was was sort of one of the key thinkers of how we think about empiricism, it's important to be aware that he didn't reject the role of reason Entirely. When we think about Aristotle, one of the key things that how we use that empirical information is it does require reason to act on it. So it's although although Aristotle is very much an empiricist, you know, it's not a case of either one or the other. Unlike Plato, Aristotle also rejected the separability. Not also unlike Plato, Aristotle rejected the separability of the soul and the body. The soul stayed in the body. And when when you die, it it dies, whereas you have Plato. That's immortal. So Aristotle argued it was the efficient cause of of the body. So it's what causes it to, to sort of be animated, do stuff and that without each other that doesn't exist. So Although there is a lot of debate on that. Um, certainly in how that's translated to Christianity. Quite different views on what the soul consists of, what it does. The other difference is in terms of the capacity for these souls. So unlike Plato, Aristotle made a much sharper distinction between different souls and and what organisms have what. So you still have a distinction between the sort of the basic functions, your nutritive stuff, your sort of lower psychological functions, your senses, your your emotions and your reason. But the key thing that Aristotle argued is that with the nutritive soul, plants had that and that alone. Then you go to the sensitive which plants and animals that. SPEAKER 2 Sorry. SPEAKER 0 All the way round. So nutritive soul plants, animals and people have sensitive soul, animals and people have and rational soul we have alone. So as you move up complexity of of of sort of these functions, they are accessible to fewer organisms. The final bit I want to talk about in terms of Aristotle and this, this is also referred to in the textbook, is his sort of model, his theory of the mind. So with this, you start to get thinking about some of these psychological functions that become psychology, in this case, several thousands of years later. So the way that Levi describes Aristotle conceptualising the mind begins with what are referred to as the special senses. So, so our empirical senses, you know, sight, sound, taste, smell, things that we take in information about from the world around us. These then get integrated into what he refers to as common sense. So a that is integrating these different pieces of information that's not common sense in like bits of information that we should know. So it's not common sense in how we use that term today, but as a combination of, of, of these different senses, which can then go in and out of imagination on sort of mental imagery in our memories, so that information can be stored or encoded and that that can then be pulled out back into common sense. Information now from common sense can translate into what he refers to as the passive mind, which is sort of more like a like a blank repository. So it's not necessarily something that that does stuff. Um, it's almost like a canvas that is acted upon by the active mind, which is sort of the the higher intellectual function. Now, the active mind is important to be aware. Very little agreement on what that refers to. There's a lovely article on the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy that basically says, we have no idea what this exactly refers to. So. So I'm not even going to try. Um, and at this point we can have a break. So if you should, we say ten minutes because we are quite a ways through the lecture now. So if we take ten minutes off, I will then start back up about 4:10 or five.