Chapter 6 (rough concepts) Flashcards
Spinoza
Pantheism: god is everywhere ( no demons, anthropomorphic god). Church hated him
Double aspectism: denied dualism. Mind, body, and god are all aspects of the same thing.
Panpsychism: because god is everywhere and god thinks then everywhere is thought
denial of free will: god is nature and nature is lawful. Humans are part of nature
hedonism: clear ideas are good and we seek them. Immmorality is against our nature.
Emotions and passions: distinguished between the two. Emotions are mental feelings associated with something. Passions reduce our chances of survival.
- showed that 48 emotions could come from just pleasure and pain, which is the basis for motivation by hedonism. Also, we associate emotions. We hate that which hurts what we love.
Very influential to modern psych and Freud: unclear thoughts should be made clear, passions should be controlled by the rational mind.
Because God is a thinking material substance then so is nature, and so is man. God’s nature is matter and thought
Spinoza
Liebniz
Developed integral and differential calculus at the same time as Newton. Developed calculating machines early computer science
- criticized Locke’s idea of Tabula Rasa, he misread it as being without innate faculties. (locke actually featured an active mind with innate faculties)
1. Vs Locke: went radically the other way: no ideas come from experience (nativist). Physical things cant cause mental things. The potential for ideas is innate to humans, not a feature of brain physics or chemistry.
Marble statue metaphor: hercules is in the marble block, it takes work to make it a statue of hercules
Monadology: Attempt to combine science with God. Used microscope to see movement, called the movers “monads (singular)”. Everything is monads and living.
- monads differ in intelligence, but they seek understanding and clear ideas. (like Aristotle’s potentialisites, they seek purpose).
- humans are next to god in terms of Monad’s quality.
Psychophysical parallelism and pre-established harmony: universe was created in harmony. Monads of mind and body seem to effect eachother because God set them like a clock to act the same way at the same time, not because of interactionism.
- Voltaire criticized monadism for saying this was the best of all possible worlds.
insensible perceptions: to Liebniz, as important as
the atom is to physics.
- Law of continuity: things exist on a continuum not a binary. This is true for perception, thoughts, subconscious and conscious.
- petites perceptions: thoughts below threshold of awareness
- apperception: conscious awareness.
- limen: the threshold between conscious and unconscious
First dude to postulate an unconscious mind, influenced Freud
A fellow Scotsman to Hume, who instead proposed rationalism vs. Hume’s empiricism. Used a commonsense argument that innate faculties exist because if you are arguing against them then you are using reason to do so…
- If Hume’s logic tells him we can’t know the real world then his logic is faulty. Why would we doubt it, it’s all humans see. “METAPHYSICAL LUNACY”- When a man reasons himself away from common sense with metaphysical arguments.
Thomas Reid
Direct Realism, how does it work?
Thomas Reid
aka naive realism
- The idea that humans immediately see the world as it is.
Reid: associationism or rational mind/operations is not required for conscious awareness! (even as a rationalist)
- Innate ability of perception allows us to see things in meaningful units, not as smaller parts that we then associate together.
T or F
1. Faculty psychology points to the presence of innate faculties in specific areas of the brain
- Faculties were used to explain mental phenomena
F
That is more phrenologists.
F
seldom the case, more used to explain mental abilities
This thinker believed that the mind’s faculties worked together as a totality, one thing that immediately gives us awareness of things as meaningful units. Not as discrete parts of information to be assembled by the mind.
Thomas Reid
Who influenced Kant? In what way, and explain the reaction
Initially Liebniz, but when he read Hume he was awakened by a desire to disprove Hume’s idea that causation was a mental experience humans have and thus all knowledge was subjective and fallible.
- Kant proposed “categories of thought” to solve this. We interpret things through unity, totality, time, space, cause/effect, reality, quantity, quality, negation, (im)possibility, (non)existence.
- Kant proposed a mind without concepts could not make sense of sensory info, but a mind with only concepts would have nothing to apply those to! So rationalism/empiricism!
We don’t experience the physical world directly and cant be sure of it (agreed with Hume).
- Our phenomenological experience comes from categories of thought interacting with sensory info
Kant
What is Noumena?
“things in themselves”. Kant’s term for the physical reality that we can not know directly.
What did Kant and Reid have in common?
What did they disagree on?
Both were faculty psychologists in the same way. They saw the mind as a functioning unit, it’s capabilities were not separate and housed in the brain. It’s abilities function as a whole.
Disagreed on Reid’s naive realism. Kant aligned with hume
Explain how Kant would explain our perception of time and space.
How was his nativism different from that of Descartes?
Time: we see a cart passing, the sun going down. Space: we see objects as apart or together.
- No cue hints us to this (no multi-faceted system of mental operations occurs here), it simply “is” in our mind because of the innate categories of thought. Not in the Thomas Reid Naive Realism sense that we see the world as it it, but in Hume’s sense that we interpret that which is there without seeing the real thing.
- Descartes proposed “innate ideas”, Kant proposed “innate categories of thought” that organize sensory info.
What ethical theory did Kant intend to “rescue” empiricists from?
How did he do it? How do these moral theories resemble the overarching philosophies associated with them?
Utilitarianism
The categorical imperative: don’t act in such a way that it should not become a universal law.
Was not meant as an absolute
- empiricists followed utilitarianism as pain avoidance and pleasure/good seeking. Thus, hedonistic just like empiricists usually think.
- Kant’s Cat Imperative represents rationalism and free will.
Provide examples of how Kant influenced psychology thinkers
The Gibsons: perception researchers.
- visual cliff: babies won’t crawl over what appears to be a cliff. Suggests our eyes and brains innately detect and avoid the cliff. Marry Kant’s ideas with evolutionary psych and neuroscience to place those innate abilities in the brain.
- Kant said the mind could not be studied objectively and thus psych couldn’t be a science.
- Introspection isn’t valid because the mind doesn’t sit still and introspection itself changes the result
Kant did not believe psych could be a science. How did he propose mental processes and human behavior be studied?
By focusing on human behavior. he figured we could predict and control human behavior
Who saw the universe as an interrelated unity, similar to Spinoza?
What did he call this concept? Explain how it relates to his epistemology
Hegel. The Absolute.
- similar to Plato’s epistemology: our senses don’t directly relate to real existence. Knowledge is gained through understanding concepts, with the “ultimate concept” being god. (Plato didn’t put god here, obviously)
Explain how Hegel believed human intellect and history progress towards the absolute
The dialectic process
Thesis (view proposed)
antithesis (refutation of same)
synthesis (resolution of thesis with its refutation)
Hegel did to Kant what Kant did to Hume. How?
Kant began his philosophy agreeing with Hume about subjective reality and that cause and effect can’t just come from experience. He explain it using innate categories of thought
Hegel agreed with Kant about categories of thought but asked: why do those exist? They are a result of the dialectic process and human’s movement towards the absolute.
What Hegelian concepts influenced other thinkers?
- Dude was famous in his own time.
Alienation: the mind being separated from the absolute.
- marxists (people’s alienation from the fruits of their labour),
- Fromm: alienation from labour
- Rogers: self from the urge to self-actualize
Herbart
Liebniz fan but then moved to Kant
- rejected faculty psych.
- Psychic mechanics: wanted to mathematize psychology:
Explain the idea of psychic mechanics. Whose idea was this?
Herbart
- Empiricist’s idea that ideas are the remnants of sense impressions. Leibniz’ idea of monad-like ideas with an energy of their own thus not requiring association laws to bind them.
- Ideas compete for “self-preservation” aka conscious awareness (aka clarity) and attract or repel other ideas based on compatibility.
- In this battleground ideas are never killed, just weakened and sunk to obscurity/unconscious.
The Apperceptive Mass (apperception borrowed form Leibniz)
- hostile to ideas not compatible with The Mass. It will keep them out. (REPRESSION is the term he used)
- If there are enough repressed ideas they will form a new mass and replace, or if the mass changes it might accommodate some.
Limen (also borrowed).
- threshold between conscious and unconscious
Herbart tried to use math to represent this model.
Herbart was an educational psychologist. What did he propose teachers do?
- review material already learned
- Prepare student with an overview of coming material. Creates receptive apperceptive mass
- Present the new material
- Relate new material to what has already been learned
- Show applications of new material. Give overview of what is to be learned next.
Similar to Piaget’s modern teaching theories. Piaget said that education should start with what the student can fit into his existing mental structure. If it’s incompatible with that, it simply can’t be learned.
Same idea, just Herbart figured the apperceptive mass should be receptive to the new ideas.
- Well, like Kant, he didn’t think it could be studied experimentally or objectively. He DID think it could be quantified mathematically, and that actually encouraged the development of experimental psychology!
Social cognition and Freud (unconscious stuff)
Who held the belief of psychophysical double aspectism?
Spinoza. AKA, double aspectism.
God is both material and conscious, as is everything in the universe because God is actually everything. Including humans.
Thus,
humans are a material object from which consciousness can not be separated: double aspectism.
