Confucius

(Classical Chinese Philosophy)

-Moral philosophy.

-Optimize self-actualization of humans in order to optimize their functioning in society.

-Inherently good and moral, but learn to be immoral.

-Engage with society to improve it.

Taoism

(Classical Chinese Philosophy)

-Follows "Tao": The Way, meaning nature, natural causality.

-Focuses on simplicity, tranquility, and "wu-wei": inaction.

-One should withdraw from society to perfect ones self. 

Protagoras

(Classical Greece)

-Most important of "sophists": teacher of wisdom.

-"Man is the measure of all things."

-Truth is entirely subjective.

Plato

(Classical Greece)

-Student of Socrates.

-Founded 1st Philosophical Academy.

-SOCRATES leads one to reach HIS truths through a carefully constructed series of questions, so that the truth of HIS argument becomes self-evident.

-Correct knowledge is pre-existing w/in each of us, and only needs to be discovered thru process of reasoning.

Plato

(Classical Greece)...cont.

-Pure reason is sufficient to learn everything about Universe.

-The Republic: mental life has three components: reason, desire, and spirit.

-Reason alone survives body after death in purified form.

-Perception/Imagination dies with body, making Reason superior to both.

-This notion of mind as material, separate from and superior to the body, marks beginning of dualistic concept of mind/soul. 

-Extreme cencorship, so citizens won't be exposed to stories/ideas that undermine their moral fiber (people exposed to such ideas will imitate behavior in them). 

Aristotle

(Classical Greece)

-Student of Plato, but rejected belief in pure reason as a means of understanding the world.

-The Lyceum: founder of this school.

-De Anima: defines mind and soul as different constructs. 

-Originator of biological basis for consciousness.

-Thought that Plato's reson, desire, and spirit were different levels of being alive.

-Humans have reason enabling them to impose a plan upon desire.

-Higher cogntive powers develop from sensations, sensory experiences.

-Imagination is created by the minds effort to consider sensory experiences when physical object is not present.

Aristotle

(Classical Greece)...cont.

-Memory is created by imaginary image combined w/ sense of "pastness" of that image.

-Knowledge is pre-existing to be discovered by pure reason, but is learned through sensory impressions of the environment.

-Insisted on starting with observable, demonstratable facts before generating theroy (steps toward scientific method).

-Stories w/ negative emotiona content poduced different effect in art than in direct life experience. Dealing w/ these feelings in art allowed people to discharge inherent emotional contents so they did not need to act on them in real life- KATHARSIN (Catharsism). 

Avicenna

(Peripetetic Islamic Philosophy)

-"Rational soul" (mind) is non-corporeal and separate from the body.

-"Rational soul", suspended entirely outside of any experience of external reality, would conjure up idea of "self" as its 1st thought, and so implied that self is of the primary idea, perhaps even of infant in womb.

Averroes

(Peripetetic Islamic Philosophy)

-Thruth is derived from reason rather than faith.

-Humans share a form of collective intellect, as well as having forms of intellect w/ a purely individual locus. 

Rene Descartes

("Modern" European Philosophy)

-Father of "Modern" Philosophy.

-Senses deceive us, so we can't be sure they are ever telling us the truth. 

-"Cogito Ergo Sum": "I think; therfore, I am.": only thing to really be sure about is that he is really thnking things.

-Essence of being is thought, and so mind is separate from the body.

-Humans only understand external things thru mind, rather than senses. 

-God created us.

-Body not just physical, but mechanical. Mind is non-physical. 

-This separation is "Cartesian Dualism"

-Believed in doctrine of innate ideas. 

Benedict Spinoza

(Cartesian Rationalism)-Rationalists:

Knowledge is derived from pure reason

-Three basic emtions: joy, sorrow, and desire.

     *48 different emotional states which are combinations of these 3 basic emotions, interfacing w/ positive and negative stimuli of everyday life.

     *If you underdstand cause of emotion, you can eliminate its power over you.

Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz

(Cartesian Rationalism)-Rationalists:

knowledge is derived from pure reason

-complex perceptions are made of tiny perceptions, which we are not individually conscious of. 

-1st notion of the "unconscious."

Thomas Hobbes

(British Empiricism)-Empiricists:

knowledge is derived from experience, observation

-Rejected idea of non-material soul/mind and doctrine of innate ideas.

-1st modern writer to suggest that mind's contents begin w/ sensory impressions and more complex ideas are fomred from inter-connected sensory impressions.

-1st "associanist": ideas become linked or 'associated' to each other.

-Links are formed b/w ideas in memory, not because of logical relationships b/w them, but because of co-occurence when first experienced.

John Locke

(British Empiricism)-Empiricists:

knowledge is derived from experience, observation

-Set out to defute notion of innate ideas.

-Introspectively observed nature of his own experience as well as others.

-"Mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone."

-Mind of an infant is a Tabula Rasa: blank slate.

-Divided mental contents into two major categories: 

     1)Ideas of Sensation: ideas that are direct product of sensory experiences.

     2)Ideas of Reflection: ideas produced by interior mental processes, reasoning, believing, imagining, etc. 

*Child's 1st ideas are simple: ideas of sensation/reflection. As child grows, complex ideas are formed thru abstract/simple ideas.

*Simple ideas are linked to become complex thru association.

John Locke

(British Empiricism)-Empiricists:

knowledge is derived from experience, observation...cont.

-Objects perceived thru our senses have "primary" and "secondary" perceptual qualities.

     *Primary Qualities: "exists" in the object.

     *Secondary Qualities: "subjective"-produced by our perceptions of them and can vary. Thus being "not real."

-"Association": Complex ideas are built out of simple ideas.

George Berkeley

(British Empiricism)-Empiricists:

knowledge is derived from experience, observation. 

-"Esse Est Percipi": To be, is to be perceived.

-Argued w/ Locke's theory, stating since perceptions of objects are all we have, we can't differientiate b/w qualities which are inherently in object, and qualities which are somehow an artifact of our perceptual processes.

-Universe is essentially created by our perception of it. 

-God perceives everything all the time, so things don't go away if you sop looking at them (Religious Philosophy).

-Visual perception does not inherently give us the ability to perceive depth, distance, relative position, etc. 

-Infants experiment w/ their visual perceptions, and by means of intergrating data from touch, etc., learn to judge distance from a trial and error process of experimentation.

David Hume

(British Empiricism)-Empiricists:

knowledge is derived from experience, observation.

-His epistemology constitutes most IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION of Empricism to psychological philosophy.

     *We cannot determine cause/effect from observation because of our habit of perception.

-cannot know one phenomena caused the other, only that they consistently appear to happen together.

*Important to scientific method because we make a key differientiation b/w cause/effect and correlational data.

-Distinction b/w impressions and ideas:

     *Impressions-direct sensory images, more vivid than complex ideas and must preced them.

David Hume

(British Empiricism)-Empiricists:

knowledge is derived from experience, observation...cont.

-"The Passions": pleasure and pain produced distinct emotions. 

-Association of an emotion w/ a particular object could change its subjective nature.

-"Self" is a "connected heap" of perceptions and associations, not as simple as subjective illusion of wholeness/continuity.

-Awareness of thought proves that thought exists, but does not demonstrate that there really is an "I" who is doing the thinking, rather, thinking just creates a subjective illusion of the consistency of "I."

Immanuel Kant

(German Idealism)

-Belived it would be impossible to create a science of psychology. 

-Since mental processes have no physical form, they cannot be measured.

Anton Mesmer

(Influential Charlatans)

-Used magnets w/ peopl suffering from ailments that would later be labeled, "hysteria," or today, as "conversion disorders."

-"Mesmerism": became a term for a form of hypnotism, which would account for any of his "cures."

Franz Gall

(Influential Charlatans)

-Pioneering work in nueroanatomy that introduced idea of localization of brain functions.

-"Phrenology":(psuedoscience)determination of mental capacities and personality traits by examining the shape of the skull.

-Psychological discipline which attempts to quantify relationship b/w physical stimuli and subjective experience of them. 

-All earliest psychological scientific research falls under this category.

Ernst Weber

(Psychophysics)

-Presented an extensive experimental exploration of the sensory phenomenology of tactile experience.

-Just noticeable difference (JND):smallest perceptible difference b/w two sensations.

     *JND in the intensity of a sensation is a function of the change in the magnitude of a stimulus by a constant factor of its original magnitude. The bigger the change in the stimulus had to be, before it became noticeable. "Weber's Law"

-Provided for the possibility of establishing quantitaive relationships b/w variations in physical and mental events. 

*"Two-point threshold": spread compass points apart until you notice that there are two points, not one.