Exam 2 Flashcards
Rationalism
- Rationalists believed in an active mind. The mind adds something to sensory data rather than passively organizing it and storing it in memory.
- Rationalists believed in innate mental processing ability and the necessity of understanding the processing ability. The rationalists emphasized deductive reasoning.
- Rationalists believed that there are truths about the world which cannot be grasped from experience. These truths must be discovered through such processes as logical deduction, analysis, and argumentation.
- Many of the rationalists were continental Europeans, especially German.
Spinoza’s Emotions: Double aspectism
The idea that mind and body are one and the same but display different facets, like the two sides to the same coin.
Spinoza denied the existence of free will. In his cosmology, God=Nature=Humans;
therefore human thoughts and behavior are lawful.
Spinoza was one of the first Western philosophers to look at emotions in detail. He divided passions (not tied to thoughts) from emotions (tied to thoughts). Spinoza also placed human emotions along a continuum anchored by pleasure and pain. Some 48 different emotions could be derived along this continuum from the varying mixtures of pleasure and pain.
Leibniz and Monads
the ultimate units of reality are not material particles in motion, but an infinitude of energy-laden and soul-invested units
Rational Monads
rational monads (closest to God and corresponding to the rational souls of humans, these monads are key to the process of apperception by which an object is focused on and understood)
Sentient Monads
sentient monads (which make up the souls of living but nonhuman beings, they possess capacities for conscious pleasure and pain and the voluntary focusing of attention)
Simple Monads
simple monads (which make up the body of all organic and inorganic matter; they have little if any conscious perception)
Leibniz and Apperception
Leibniz believed that there are ‘insensible perceptions or petites perceptions which are not experienced. These are the elemental components of conscious perceptions in the same way that atoms are the elemental components of material objects.
As petites perceptions accumulate, their combined force causes conscious awareness, or what Leibniz called apperception. There exists a continuum between the conscious and unconscious mind. When the mass of petites’ perceptions crosses the limen (threshold It enters conscious awareness through the process of apperception. This notion of the Limen will encourage the work of Johann Friedrich Herbart and later German experimentalists.
Immanuel Kant and Rationalism
Kant did agree with Hume that nothing in experience proves causation; however, we can be certain of its existence. Kant argued that there are the a priori categories of thought; that is, ways of thought that are not reliant on experience. Sensory data might provide information on the world, but through the categories of thought the mind added something to the data so that knowledge could be obtained.
Hegel and the Dialectical Movement
Hegel’s version of the dialectic process involved a thesis (one point of view), an antithesis (the opposite point of view), and a synthesis (a resolution between the thesis and the antithesis). When a cycle is completed, the previous synthesis becomes the thesis for the next cycle, and the process repeats itself continually. In this manner, both human history and the human intellect evolve toward the Absolute.
Herbart’s Dynamic View of the Mind
Psychic Mechanics: Herbart believed in what has been labeled psychic mechanics. He dismissed the idea of laws of association as inadequate and believed that ideas have the power to attract or repel other ideas, depending on their compatibility. This was a twist on Leibniz’s view of the monad possessing energy. Ideas compete to find expression in the consciousness and in doing so expend energy. Ideas in the consciousness are bright and clear, while those ideas in the unconsciousness are dark and obscure. Each idea struggles to become clear, what Herbart called self-preservation. Ideas are not destroyed, but sink into the unconscious when they lose vitality. Herbart agreed with the empiricists that ideas are derived from experience, but once they came into being they had a life of their own.
Apperceptive Mass: Herbart drew Leibniz with his idea of an apperceptive mass. Herbart believed that at any given moment, compatible ideas gather in the consciousness and form an apperceptive mass. The mass is what we are paying attention to at the moment. If an idea is compatible with the apperceptive mass, it will be admitted. But if it is not, repression on the part of the mass will keep it out. The repressed idea will continue to exist and look for an opportunity to join the apperceptive mass.
Limen: Herbart accepted Leibniz’s idea of the limen to describe the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind. Herbart’s take would influence the work in physio-psychology by other Germans
Educational Psychology
He developed methods of teaching and retention.
Romanticism
Romantics believed certain truths were outside the province of reason. They appealed to the human desire for faith and emotional feeling. Humanity was an abstract concept, and national and cultural identity was unique. Romanticism rejected Christianity and looked for meaning within nature and pantheism. Romantics looked for the laws of nature through intuitive comprehension
Germany was the country most affected by romanticism. German romantics also looked at history, religion, art, mythology and science as being bound together in any given age. Together they not only expressed culture, but also the spirit or geist of the times. In this grand unity, both the internal world of the man and the external world of nature were ONE. The mind through intuition could grasp the totality of the whole. This was a secularized pantheism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Considered the father of romanticism and wrote The Social Contract.
The Social Contract
He saw society as an artificial creation which denied basic human nature. For this reason, people acted from selfish motives and engaged in anti-social activity. They also were unable to realize their full potential.
He believed in a state in which the government was supreme and upheld the conditions that allowed the people to reach their full potential and express their free will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He is considered the originator of Sturm und Drang literature, a genre which sank deep roots in German culture. Through this literature Goethe expressed his belief that life consisted of opposing forces such as life and death, love and hate. One should embrace all and live life with passion and an eye toward continuous growth.
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
The Will
In humans, this force manifests itself in the will to survive, which causes an unending cycle of needs and need satisfaction. For Schopenhauer, the powerful drive toward self-preservation—not the intellect and not morality—accounts for most human behavior. Most human behavior, then, is irrational. To satisfy our will to survive, we must eat, sleep, eliminate, drink, and engage in sexual activity. The pain caused by an unsatisfied need causes us to act to satisfy the need. When the need is satisfied, we experience momentary satisfaction (pleasure), which lasts only until another need arises, and on it goes.
Schopenhauer and Sexuality
Sex is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort and The genitals are the focus of the will. It is the will that drives people to reproduce, and it is a force that takes precedence over reason.
Existentialism
Existentialists prized free will and encouraged others to embrace their personal freedom as a way of finding meaning in the here and now. They also held that personal experience and feeling are the most valid guides for behavior. The goal of life should be personal achievement and fulfillment. To do so, all components of experience, the good and the bad, should be embraced.
The Love Affair with God
For Kierkegaard a love affair is at once passionate, happy, and painful. He believed one should read the Bible as one should read a love letter. The words of the Bible should touch the reader emotionally and personally. The meaning of the Bible should evoke feelings (you would not apply a dictionary to a love letter). Truth for Kierkegaard is subjectivity, your subjectivity.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian Sides
Nietzsche believed that there were two slides to the human mind: the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The Apollanian represents the human rational side and reflects our desire for predictability, tranquility and order.
The Dionysian reflects the human irrational side with our attraction to creative chaos and passionate dynamic experiences.
The Death of God
God was dead and that humanity had killed him. Humans had relied on God for meaning and morality, but the scientist and philosophers of the 19th century had discredited that notion of deity. Darwin had shown that Humans are just a kink on the evolutionary chain, and that we share the fate of death like every other creature.
The will to power
Will to Power: Humans needed to acknowledge their freedom and use it to find meaning. Humans are basically irrational, but irrationality needed to be expressed. You need to act as you truly feel, even aggressive tendencies need to be displayed. Nietzsche believed that Christian morality had dampened this elemental human feature with its emphasis on protecting the weak and engaging in charity.
Materialism
Their interest will be in the material of the body and how it might account for the phenomenal world of the individual.
Charles Bell and Francois Magendie
White and grey matter
Sensory nerves carried impulses forward from the sense receptors to the brain, and motor nerves carried impulses forward from the brain to the muscles and glands. The Bell-Magendie law demonstrated separate sensory and motor tracts in the spinal cord and suggested separate sensory and motor regions in the brain.
The Doctrine of Specific Nerve Endings - Müller
There are different types of sensory nerves, each containing a characteristic energy. When stimulated, nerves convey a particular sensation to the brain. Each sense organ is maximally sensitive to a particular type of stimulation (the eye is the most stimulated by the light energy, the skin by pressure, and so forth). As we examine the environment, sensory acuity provides a range of sensations and perceptions. Some people are more sensitive than others and this is a reflection of sensory acuity.
The ‘Helmholtz Oath’
They views that all processes could be explained in ordinary chemical and physical terms.
No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their activity by means of the physical mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the physical-chemical forces inherent in matter,
reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.
We are not going to except any explanation for anything that is not rooted in chemistry or physics
Ewald Hering
Hering accounted for gray by explaining that there are three receptors in the eye. One accounts for red-green, one accounts for yellow-blue, and one accounts for white-black. In terms of energy, red, yellow, and white have a catabolic effect, while that of green, blue, and black have an anabolic effect. If the catabolic and anabolic processes happen simultaneously, gray is perceived.
Christine Ladd-Franklin
Ladd-Franklin noted that some animals see only in monochrome (black and white) and assumed that this form of chromatic vision appeared first in evolution, color vision came later.
She further assumed that the human eye carries the vestiges of its earlier evolutionary era.
Ladd-Franklin observed that the most highly evolved part of the eye is the fovea, where, at least in daylight, visual acuity and color sensitivity are greatest.
She noted that peripheral vision (provided by the rods of the retina) was more primitive than foveal vision (provided by the cones of the retina) because night vision and movement detection are crucial for survival
Phrenology - Franz Joseph Gall
He argued that there was dedicated portions of the brain that does specific functions.
Gall believed in faculty psychology and argued that different regions of the brain were responsible for different emotional, intellectual, and behavioral functions.
His partner, Spurzheim believed there were 21 emotional faculties and 14 intellectual ones in the brain.
Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke
Paul Broca discovered that damage to the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area) impairs speech production, leading to non-fluent aphasia.
Carl Wernicke identified that damage to the left temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area) impairs language comprehension, resulting in fluent aphasia with impaired understanding of speech.
Ernst Weber
He found that the sense of touch was not one but several senses. Developed Weber’s Law, the first quantitative law in psychology
Fechner’s Law
He believed that it was possible to measure the mental processes of perception as well as the physical intensities of sensory stimuli. Taking the two, one could determine the mathematical relationship between the two measures. The relationship should be harmonious and indicative of the underlying unity between the physical and psychological worlds.
