John Locke Research Paper

The following paper will discuss philosophers and scientists who created the foundation for modern psychological thought and treatments. I will discuss John Locke who was an Oxford scholar, medical researcher and physician, political operative, economist and ideologue for a revolutionary movement, as well as being one of the great philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. And then I will discuss Wilhelm Wundt who is thought of as one of the founding fathers of psychology. Wundt is credited for founding psychology, or in other words he made psychology a true science. John Locke was considered one of the most influential philosophers in post-renaissance Europe, which was about the mid 1600s. Locke has been recognized
Out of his lectures came another significant book, Principles of Physiological Psychology (Schultz & Schultz, 2008). The books reviews were positive saying that Wundt had “defined the scope and tasks of physiological psychology to come, and that his book would be influential in directing the work of many younger psychologists who shared the same objective.” Wundt continued to write and ended up with several important volumes based on his new science, his first called Contributions Towards A Theory Of Sense Perception, which created a vision of psychology as a field of its own containing three general subdivisions. In the first division of his book, psychology would follow the principles of the physical sciences and be conducted as an experimental science. The main focus of this psychology would involve mental processes, which were important to experimental observation, and manipulation such as reaction time to stimuli. The second edition, Wundt pictured psychology paired with the tradition of the social sciences. This involved the higher or more complex mental processes. These could no be brought under direct control in the laboratory. Example of these metal processes he is referring to would be religion, social practices, and language. This study of psychology required other methods of investigation such as historical records and naturalistic observation in the field. This was termed the comparative historical approach. The final form of psychology Wundt called scientific metaphysics. This form of psychology would be used to integrate the empirical work in the lab with other scientific findings. (Boring,