Psychology 310
September 13, 2010
History of Psychology
Psychology on the whole is the study of and nature of the mind and metal processes. Questions concerning these factors were initially thought and discussed by different ancient Greek philosophers. Descartes’s was famous for his articulation of substance dualism at a time that was considered the era of revolutionary developments in the seventeenth century (p31). Descartes asserted that the only way to get to the certainty of the truth was to arrive at it yourself and that one can only rely on the clear use of our own reasoning. The 4th and 5th centuries were dominated by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle’s and their theories continue to be largely influential today. Their theories made fundamental contributions to all of the main branches of philosophy. http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/9112/Greek-philosophy.html 09/11/2010 .
The British philosopher John Locke was especially known for his liberal, anti-authoritarian theory of the state, his empirical theory of knowledge, his advocacy of religious toleration, and his theory of personal identity. He asserted that when we are born our brain are basically blank and that what we experience becomes our memory; for instance what we sees, hear, smells, tastes and feels are written in our minds from actually experiencing it. egarding epistemology, Locke disagreed with Descartes‘ rationalist theory that knowledge is any idea that seems clear and distinct to us. Instead, Locke claimed that knowledge is direct awareness of facts concerning the agreement or disagreement among our ideas. By “ideas,” he meant mental objects, and by assuming that some of these mental objects represent non-mental objects he inferred that this is why we can have knowledge of a world external to our minds. Although we can know little for certain and must rely on probabilities, he believed it is our God-given obligation to obtain knowledge and not always