Psych Overview: U1 Ch1 Flashcards
Who was Aristotle?
Greek Philosopher
A group of medieval philosophers who supported the doctrine that the components of a “thing” corresponded to the perceptible properties of that “thing.”
Scholastic Philosophers
A polish astronomer known for the hypothesis that the sun rather than the earth was the center of the system.
Copernicus
all organisms, including the simplest plants, included this and enabled them to nourish themselves and to reproduce.
Vegetative Soul
This soul provided animals with more complex functions of locomotion, sensation, memory, and imagination.
Sensitive Soul
This soul enables humans to reason consciously and take on the highest moral virtues.
Rational soul
originally meant simply, “breath” in ancient Greek, by Aristotle’s time it had taken on additional meaning as the animating force within all living things, the essential ingredient differentiation the living from the nonliving.
Psyche/Anima
Descartes first method for obtaining knowledge
Never accept anything as true unless I recognized it to be certainly and evidently as such: that is carefully to avoid all precipitation and prejudgment, and to include nothing in my conclusions unless it presented itself so clearly and distinctly in my mind that there was no reason or occasion to doubt.
Doubt everything and then to take as axiomatic only that which proved to be indubitable
Descartes route to certainty
What tradition in psychology was begun by Descartes’ mechanistic physiology
Neuropsychology
Descartes argued that animals could be understood completely in mechanistic terms, as __________.
automata
Ideas independent as they are of specific sensory experience (but capable of being suggested or alluded to by experience), must derive from the nature of the thinking soul itself.
Innate ideas
Descartes’ philosophy rated reason and the intellective functions of the conscious mind as more fundamental than, and potentially independent of, sensory experience. For this reason Descartes is commonly labeled a _________.
Rationalist
And because his system posits innate ideas existing prior to concrete experience, he is also called a…
Nativist
Opponents of native rationalism–arguing in various ways that the mind arises primarily out of concrete experience, or that there can exist no innate ideas independent of sensory experience–are referred to as…
empiricists
