Psych 120H - Lecture 6

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Julien de la Mettrie

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- Got a huge fever and experienced the effects of bodily processes on mental activity. Concluded that bodily processes are intimately related with mind processes.
- What you eat and drink influences your mind!

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Pyrrho of Elis

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- considered the founder of the school of Skepticism

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Dogmatism

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The tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others

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Emperor Constantine

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- dreamt about a Christian cross in the sky
- Attributed his victory to the God of the Christians.
- He signed the edict of Milan making Christianity a tolerated religion in the Roman Empire.

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The Dark Ages

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- Fall of Rome to the Goths
- Death of Augustine
- Greek and Roman books were lost or destroyed -- little or no progress was made in science, philosophy or literature

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St. Augustine

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- Preached that individuals are free to choose between the way of the flesh, which is sinful, and the way of God.
- People have an internal sense that helps them evaluate their experiences by providing an awareness of truth, error, personal obligation, and moral right.
- Wrote "Confessions"

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Maimonides

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- Jew born in Cordova, Spain.
- Showed relationship between ethical living and mental helath.
- Wrote "The Guide for the Perplexed" -- for scholars who were confused by the apparent conflict between religion and the scientific and philosphical thought of the day. Sought reconciliation between Judaism and Aristotelian philosophy.

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Socrates

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- Agreed with Sophists: Individual experience is important -- "Know thyself"
- Inductive definition: examination of instances of such concepts as beauty, love, justice, etc. and then moved on to such questions as, What is it that all instances of beauty have in common?
- What Socrates sought was the essence of something. To truly know something is to understand it's essence.
- To Socrates, understanding of essences constituted knowledge, and goal of like is to gain knowledge
- Socrates accepted the fact that a thorough definition specified an object's or a concept's essence.

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Plato

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- Was Socrates's student
- Theory of Forms/Ideas: Theory of forms is that everything in the empirical world was a manifestation of a pure form that existed in the abstract.
- An object's or a concept's essence was equated with its form.
- Form had an existence separate from its individual manifestations
- Analogy of the Divided Line
- Allegory of the Cave
- Knowledge is is innate and can be attained only through introspection

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Aristotle

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- Rationalistic and Empiristic -- however more rationalistic
- Examined nature directly
- Everything in nature has a purpose
- Information about the environment is provided by the five senses. It was important, but not a sufficient element in the attainment of knowledge
- Common sense as the mechanism that coordinated the information from all the senses (assumed to be located in the heart)
- Claimed that the main function of the brain was to cool the blood
- Believed earth to be at the center of the universe

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Ptolemy

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- Graeco-Egyptian that summarized the mathematical and observational astronomy of his time and that of antiquity

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Ptolemaic system

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included the beliefs that the heavenly bodies, including the earth, are spherical in shape, and that the sun, moon, planets, and stars travel around the earth in orbits that are circular and uniform

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Nicolaus Copernicus

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- First to propose the heliocentric theory
- Was considered heretical because it challenged church dogma. It questioned the traditional place of humankind in the universe

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Galileo

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- Brilliant mathematician
- created a modified telescope
- Found the four moons of jupiter and corrected the church in saying that there were 11 bodies instead of 7

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Isaac Newton

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- conceived of the universe as a complex, lawful machine created by God (like Galileo)
- Newton developed differential and integral calculs
- Developed the universal law of gravitation
- Believed in deism

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Rene Descartes

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- Believed in innate ideas
- Believed that much human behavior can be explained in mechanical terms, that the mind and the body are separate but interacting entities, and that the mind contains innate ideas. With Descartes began comparative physiological psychology, stimilus-response psychology, phenomenology, and a debate over whether innate ideas exist. Descartes also focused attention on the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body

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John Locke's

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- Disagreed with Descarte's beliefs on notion of innate ideas

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George Berkeley

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- Said that the only thing we experience directly is our own perceptions, or secondary qualities. Berkeley offered an empirical explanation of the perception of distance, saying that we learn to associate the sensations caused by the convergence and divergence of the eyes with different distances. Berkeley denied materialism, saying instead that reality exists because God perceives it. We can trust our senses to reflect God's perceptions because God would not create a sensory system that would deceive us.