View of the Good Life according to:

Epicureans

Avoidance of power, fame, and excess.  Focused on pleasure and pain.  Epicureans often seen as hedonists and anticipating the principle of reinforcement.

Pleasure is the greatest good, but the way to go about attaining pleasure is through living simply, gaining knowledge of the world, and limiting one's desires.

View of the Good Life according to:

Stoics

To accept one's fate and have courage in the face of suffering.  Good life was found by using thoughts to control emotions.

Ne stoics view emotions as highly discriminating repsonses to what is of value and importance and shape the landscape of our mental and social lives

(Founded by Zeno, popularized by Marcus Aurelius)

"Virtue is sufficient for happiness" therefore the stoic is immune to suffering.  Virtue means maintaining a will that is consistent with nature.

View of the Good Life according to:

Socrates

The Good Life According to:

Aristotle

Eudiamonia - living well and doing well, a happy life is an active life of funcitioning well in those ways that are essential and unique to humans.  i.e. thinking rationally

Virtue is an essential component, but does not define the good life. Hierarchy of ends - those pursued for their own sake are final ends (i.e. studying to study not to pass a test).

Best life is that of moderation (The Golden Mean)

The Good Life According to:

Sophists

"Relativistic perspective" - truth and therefore the definition of the good life depends on the individual.  No absolute trut and focused on rhetoric and communication skills.

The Good Life According to:

Cynics

The Socratic Method and 

How might it be used?

Socratic method - a form of inquiry and discussion based to challenge beliefs by inductively referring to specific instances that contradict the belief, then deductively drawing implications and consequences for those instances.

A dialectical method often involving discussion in which the defense of one point of view is questioned until a participant contradicts him/herself, thus strengthening the other's point.

Socratic method largely used in law schools.  Questioning during a legal trial often reflects Socratic method in that the goal is to get someone to contradict themselves in order to strengthen anothers point.  Also. POLITICS.

Plato the nativist - because of his belief in innate ideas.  Reminiscence - believed that the human soul exists in immortality prior to its awakening within a human body, as a dweller amongst the forms.  The immortal soul has access to all knowledge and reason prior to its implantation in a human body.  Once the soul is awakened as a human, sense information distorts true knowledge and true knowledge of the forms becomes inaccessible.  Believes that humans gain knowledge by 'remembering' what they already knew as an immortal soul.

Plast as Rationalist - Belief that reason is the only way by which man can attain true knowledge.  Belived that sensory information is distorted and false - captured by his allegory of the cave.  Because senses are false, knowledge cannot be gained from them.

Velieved in innate personality made up of three parts:

1. ability to apply reason

2. courageous (emotional) part

3. appetitive part.

people are born with innate tendency to be dominated by one of these three parts (reason, emotion, or appetitie). Education of those with inborn inability to apply reason is not very useful.

Three different types of personality:

1. person in whom appetitie dominates, should be employed as a slave

2. The emotional person, is best employed as a soldier

3. The rational person who should be educated and employed as a ruler of men "philospher-king"

Created a form of dualism that emphasized a rejection of sensory information, which relegated science based on observation to a useless and counterproductive endeavor.  Emphasis of the 'forms' or essences that are capable of understanding through rational thought also meant a philosophical focus on unfounded abstractions, and an emphasis on studying that which could not be corroborated or replicated through expeirment or other objective means (i.e. subjective thought dominated.

Platonism lends itself much more to religious thought than to scientific thought and it was reliance on Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy that Christianity came to dominate philosophy for hundres od years after Plato.

- Remembering - spontaneous recollection of something that had been previously experienced

- Recall - invovles an actual mental search for a past experience

Laws of Association have been the basis of learning theory for over 2,000 years - concept of mental association at the heart of most theories of learning:

- Law of contiguity: when we think of something we also tend to think of things that were experienced along with it

- Law of similarity: we also tend ot think of htings that are similar to it.

- Law of contrast: we also tend to think of thinkgs that are its opposite

- Law of frequency: the more often experiences occur together, the stronger their association will be.

Plato - believed that human beings were born with an immortal soul that knows truths that exist independently of nature.  Knowledge and turth can be arrived at only by ignoring sensory experience and utilizing introspection (rationalism).  Pure thought, importance on mathematics, abstract preferable to empirical.

Aristotle - embraced both rationalism and empiricism.  Believed the mind must be mployed before knowledge can be gained (rationalism) but that the object of rational though was the information provided by the senses (empiricism).  First principles attained by examining nature directly.  Believed the body is NOT an obstacle in the search for knowledge and that nature cannot be separated from knowledge.  Believed math was useless and preferred empirical approach of observing physical and biological phenomena followed by definitio nand classification of these observations.

Marcus Aurelius:

Philosophical perspective and attitude toward life

Advocated stoicism, popularized in his book 'The meditations'

Everything that happens is necessitated with no room for chance and the universe is rational, therefore it is also good (Cosmic optimism).  Implies that there is a rational lawgiver (i.e. God).

Stoic doctrine of acceptence - keep one's will in harmony with nature

- if you are treated badly, accept it because it cannot harm you

- One's role or place in life is predestined and it is your duty to accept that post and perform the functions to the best of ability

- Freedom means accepting whatever happens as being part of a benign world order and respond to everything in a rational, not emotional manner.

Peter Abelard's Approach to Learning 

(still in use)

The Dialectic Method

Examining arguments and counterarguments. Denied reification and thus, realism.  Proposed conceptualism as a compromise b/w realism and nominalism.  Conceptualism says that once yo uname something (nominal), it becomes sometthing else that is separate, but maybe useful.

Skinner believed that Science should better the world (positivism).

Agreed with Bacon in that theories are not necessarily, and use of inductive reasoning from observations made in nature. Control of the environment

Bacon's Idols:

Idols of the Cave

personal biases that arise from a person's intellectual endowment, experiences, education, and feelings.

Any of these things can influence how an individual perceives and interprets the world.  

Bacon's Idols:

Idols of the Tribe

biases due to human nature.

All human imagine and hope for things and this usually distorts perceptions ("innate" filters on our judgment)

Bacon's Idols:

Idols of the Marketplace

Biases that result from being overly influenced by the meaning assigned to words (i.e. labels and descriptions)

 from the imperfect correspondences between the word definitions in human languages, and the real things in nature which these words represent.

 "on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding

Bacon's Idols:

Idols of the Theater

Nicholas Cage

Biases that result from blind allegiance to any viewpoint, whether it be philosophical or theological

Dartmouth-Princeton football game - interpretation of the events depended on what school the obervers attended.

Believed that God is the creator of the world, but that the world operated according to mathematical principles that humans could discover.

Natural laws which had no exceptions although human ignorance gets in the way of understanding these laws sometimes. (justifies using probability instead of certainty)

Everything that happens can be explained in terms of:

1. Space (consisting of points)

2. Time (consisting of moments)

3. Matter (existing in space and possessing mass)

4. Force (that which provides change in the motion of matter).

Encouraged empirical observation and mathematical deduction which let to curiosity and experimentation in west.

Fundamental Assumptions of Descartes regarding Human Nature

Mind and Body Problem

Human nature is two things - mind and body (dualism)

In the pursuit of answering the question about certainty, Descartes used Radical Doubt to cast all thoughts and beliefs into doubt to see if any of them stood out.

The self must necessarily exist, cannot doubt that you are thinking, human being.  Humans consist of a thinking, counsciousness (mind) which is different and separate from the body.

All of reality is constituted (he's a rationalist)

Body works like a machine, but the mind is a nonmaterial substance.  Body influences the mind (i.e. passion, emotions) and the mind influences the body

Regards the mind-body separation as an error.  Argued that emotions and sensations play an important role in how we think and behave.  The mind is 'embodied' not just 'embrained'

Can lead to misperceptions and misinterpretations in the medical field.

Idease are acquired, not innate.  They are learned from sense experience and the only knowledge humans can have is based on experience.  No innate ideas - believe in a tabula rasa.  Knowledge is built from inductive reasoning.

Empiricist: Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Jon Stuart Mill

The mind may learn some trugths directly without hte use of the senses from deductive reasoning.  Some things are known to us by intuition while others are discovered through valid arguments from intuitive propositions.  Radical position is to believe that reason is the ONLY way to acquire knowledge, but some will contend that reason takes PRECEDENCE over other ways of acquiring knowledge.

Reality has a rational structure and all aspects can be understood through math and logical principles, not just sensory.  Not tabula rasa - the mind is structured by and responds to mathematical models of reasoning.  We have some knowledge of truths as part of our innate rational nature.  Experience may trigger a process through which we bring this knowledge to consciousness, but experiences do not provide knowledge itself.

Rationalists:  Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes

Human Behavior is motivated by APPETITE.

External objects produce sense impressions that influence vital fxs of the body leading to pleasure/pain.  MOtivation and bx can be explained as either the seeking or maintaining of pleasurable experiences, and aversion - the avoidance or termination of painful experiences

Love and good are synonymous with pleasure

Hate and evil/bad are synonymous with pain

Locke insisted that nurture (experience) was much more important than nature (innate ability) for character development in children.

Locke believed that important education took place at home and school. His views on child-rearing contained many classic behavioral principles and were somewhat extreme (particularly his beliefs on teaching stress tolerance). Otherwise, his ideas concerning education now are rather routine. Locke suggested using in-vivo exposures (see next question) as a means of promoting positive behavior. Physical punishment was used to if necessary to discourage crying. Parents should provide child with basic necessities because good health and effective learning are inseparable

Within the classroom, mild physical punishment should be allowed, but not severe punishment. Teachers should always seek to make learning an enjoyable experience so that children seek opportunities to learn outside of classroom. The primary job of the teacher should be to recognize and praise student accomplishments    

24. What psychological term would you use to describe Locke’s views on learning. Why did

            Locke write his classic essay on the nature of human understanding? Why is Locke 

            considered an empiricist, given his description of an “active mind”?

• Locke’s views on education were in accordance with his empirical philosophy (i.e., the child’s environmental experience is much more important than innate ability when it comes to learning and character development). He used behavioral therapy techniques, including in-vivo exposure to promote certain behaviors (e.g., increasing child’s stress tolerance by having child sleep on hard beds, exposing child to moderate amounts of coldness and wetness to increase tolerance of life’s hardships).   
• Locke’s essay (Essay Concerning Human Understanding) was, in part, a protest against Decartes’ philosophy. Locke did not attack Descartes’ beliefs on dualism, but attacked Descartes’ notion of innate ideas. Locke’s argument was that if the mind contained innate ideas, then all humans should have those same ideas (which they clearly do not).
• Locke argued that all ideas and knowledge stemmed from experience. He believed that knowledge is derived from “external sensible objects,” or “internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves.” Yes, Locke’s description of the “the internal operations of the mind” would make you wonder as to whether he was a true empiricist but….

Despite his description of the “active mind,” Locke is still considered an empiricist because of his belief that all knowledge is ultimately derived from sensory experience. He considered ideas “mental images” that could be perceived and utilized while thinking.  For Lock, all ideas come from either sensation (i.e., direct sensory stimulation) or reflection (i.e., remnants of prior sensory stimulation). Thus, the source of all ideas is sensation but the ideas obtained by sensation can be acted on and rearranged by the operations of the mind, thereby giving rise to new ideas. While he believed the the content of the mind is derived from sensory stimulation, Locke argued that the operations of the mind are not. The operations of the mind are part of “human nature”…they are innate.  

According to Hume, for knowledge to be useful, it must either be demonstrative or empirical; if it is neither, it is not real knowledge and is therefore useless.

• Empirical knowledge is based on experienced, and it alone can furnish knowledge and effectively guide our conduct in the world.

This is in contrast to demonstrative knowledge (e.g., geometry, algebra). Demonstrative knowledge is true only by accepted definitions and does not necessarily say anything about facts or objects outside of the mind; it is abstract. This knowledge is based entirely on deduction from one idea to another and it does not say anything about empirical events

A causal relationship must be consistently observed (instead of aristotle and scholastic views that you can assume natural relations b/w two events without needing to observe the two together)

Observation need to be made in order to conclude that the two events are causally related:

a) cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time

b) cause must be prior to the effect

c) must be a constant union b/w cause and effect

d) the same cause always produces the same effect and same effect always arisses from same cause.

Predictions are based on assumptions that what happened in the past will continue to happen in the future but there is no guarantee - even if all conditions of causality listed above are met, there can still be incorrect causal inference.

It is not rationality, but the cumulative experiences (i.e. custom) that enables us to expect and predict causal relationships.

1. Writing the first two psychology textbooks (The sense and the intellect and Emotions and the will) credited his reference as the first true psychologist

2. Founded the first psych journal: mind

1. Feeling

2. Volition (conation, i.e. natural tendency, striving)

3. Intelligence (goverend by laws of association and contiguity)

What important contributions did Spinoza make to contemporary Psychology

Why does Damasio believe Spinoza is so relevant to contemporary study of emotion and feeling?

Contributions:

Spinoza the rationalist discussed that God, matter, and mind are not separate, but rather different aspects of the same thing.

Mind and body are two sides of the same coin in attempt to escape the monism and dualism debate - emotions can affect body and body can affect thoughts/emotions

God is nature characterized by extension and though.  Denial of free will.  Hedonistic motivation based on pleasure (clear thinking and purpose) and pain

According to Damasio:

Spinoza's most important contributions are the 

a) inseparability of mind and body

b) Conation (action on thoughts and feelings)

c) think on negative emotion to build tolerance and acquire knack for generating positive ones

d) self-actualization

Hegel,

What accounts for development of Human intellect?

Which contemporary theory of psychology strongly influenced Hegel's theory?

Development of understanding occurs through the dialectic process, which is process of arguing and concluding points through a thesis, atithesis, and synthesis of ideas.  Once of the cycle is complete, the synthesis of the previous step becomes the thesis to be challenged and combined.

Gestalt Psychology is heavily derived from Hege's ideas about the Absolute or Whole from which all truth can be understood