1. The subject and objectives of the history of psychology

History of Psychology- study of the formation of ideas about psychic reality at different stages of the development of scientific knowledge. The history of psychology has its own subject of study, different from the subject of psychology. The history of science is a special area of ​​knowledge. Its subject is essentially different from the subject of the science, the development of which it studies.

It should be borne in mind that the history of science can be talked about in two senses. History is a process actually taking place in time and space. He goes on as usual, regardless of what views of him are held by certain individuals. The same applies to the development of science. As an indispensable component of culture, it arises and changes regardless of what opinions about this development are expressed by various researchers in different eras and in different countries.

With regard to psychology, for centuries, ideas about the soul, consciousness, and behavior have been born and replaced each other. The history of psychology is intended to recreate a true picture of this change, to reveal what it depended on.

Psychology as a science studies the facts, mechanisms and patterns of mental life. The history of psychology describes and explains how these facts and laws were revealed (sometimes in a painful search for truth) to the human mind.

So, if the subject of psychology is one reality, namely the reality of sensations and perceptions, memory and will, emotions and character, then the subject of the history of psychology is another reality, namely, the activities of people engaged in cognition of the mental world. This activity takes place in a system of three main coordinates: cognitive, social and personal. Therefore, we can say that scientific activity as an integral system has three dimensions (soul, consciousness, behavior). Psychology as the science of the soul explained it as the cause of everything, i.e. the soul was defined as an explanatory principle. Consciousness as a subject in the history of psychology had a double function: it was both an object of study and an explanatory principle. With the emergence of a new subject of study - behavior - the subjectivism of the psychology of consciousness was overcome, but this entailed the disappearance of the very object of study - the psyche and consciousness. At the present stage of the development of science, a close connection arises between consciousness and behavior, or activity.

The main objectives of the subject of the history of psychology:

1. Analysis of the emergence and further development of scientific knowledge about the psyche from the point of view of a scientific, and not an everyday or religious approach in the study of the evolution of ideas about the human psyche.

2. Analysis and understanding of interdisciplinary connections between the history of psychology and other sciences, the disclosure of those relationships on which the achievements of psychology depend.

3. Clarification of the dependence of the origin and perception of knowledge on social, cultural and ideological influences on scientific creativity.

4. Study of the role of personality, its individual path in the formation of science itself.

2. Periodization of the history of psychology

Psychology has gone through several stages in its development.

The pre-scientific period ends approximately in the 7th-6th centuries. BC, i.e. before the beginning of objective, scientific research of the psyche, its content and functions. During this period, ideas about the soul were based on numerous myths and legends, on fairy tales and initial religious beliefs connecting the soul with certain living beings (totems).

The second, scientific period begins at the turn of the 7th – 6th centuries. BC. Psychology during this period developed within the framework of philosophy, and therefore it received the conditional name of the philosophical period. Also, its duration is somewhat conditionally established - until the appearance of the first psychological school (associationism) and the definition of psychological terminology itself, which differs from that adopted in philosophy or natural science.

In connection with the conventionality of the periodization of the development of psychology, which is natural for almost any historical research, some discrepancies arise when establishing the time boundaries of individual stages. Sometimes the emergence of an independent psychological science is associated with the school of W. Wundt, i.e. with the beginning of the development of experimental psychology. However, psychological science was defined as independent much earlier, with the awareness of the independence of its subject, the uniqueness of its position in the system of sciences - as a science both humanitarian and natural at the same time, studying both internal and external (behavioral) manifestations of the psyche. Such an independent position of psychology was also recorded with the appearance of psychology as a subject of study at universities in the late 18th - early 19th centuries. Thus, it is more correct to talk about the emergence of psychology as an independent science precisely from this period, referring to the middle of the 19th century. the formation of experimental psychology.

But in any case, it must be admitted that the period of existence of psychology as an independent science is much shorter than the period of its development in the mainstream of philosophy. Naturally, this period is not homogeneous, and psychological science has undergone significant changes over more than 20 centuries.

The subject of psychology, the content of psychological research, and the relationship of psychology with other sciences also changed.

For a long time, the subject of psychology was the soul (see Table 1), however, at different times, different content was put into this concept. In the era of antiquity, the soul was understood as the fundamental principle of the body, by analogy with the concept of "arche" - the fundamental principle of the world, the basic building block of which all that exists. In this case, the main function of the soul was considered to make the body active, since, according to the first scientists-psychologists, the body is an inert mass, which is set in motion by the soul. The soul not only provides energy for activity, but also directs it, i.e. it is the soul that governs human behavior. Gradually, cognition was added to the functions of the soul, and thus the study of the stages of cognition was added to the study of activity, which soon became one of the most important problems of psychological science.

In the Middle Ages, the soul was a subject of study primarily for theology (see Table 1), which significantly narrowed the possibilities of its scientific knowledge. Therefore, although formally the subject of psychological science has not changed, in fact, the area of ​​research at that time included the study of the types of activity of the body and the characteristics of cognition, primarily sensory cognition of the world. Regulatory function, volitional behavior, logical thinking were considered the prerogative of the divine will, the divinely inspired, and not the material soul. It is not for nothing that these aspects of mental life were not parts of the subject of scientific study in the concepts of deism and Thomism (Avicenna, F. Aquinas, F. Bacon and other scientists).

In modern times, psychology, like other sciences, got rid of the dictates of theology. Science strove again, as in the period of antiquity, to become objective, rational, and not sacred, i.e. based on evidence, on reason, not on faith. The problem of the subject of psychology arose again with all its urgency. At this time, it was still impossible to completely abandon the theological approach to understanding the soul. Therefore, psychology changes its subject, becoming the science of consciousness, i.e. about the content of consciousness and the ways of its formation. This made it possible to separate the subject of psychology from the subject of theology in the study of the soul and its functions.

However, this transition led to the fact that by the 18th century. cognitive processes became the actual subject of psychology, while behavior, as well as emotional processes, personality and its development were not included in this subject. At first, such a limitation of the field of study had a positive significance, since it gave psychology, as already mentioned, the opportunity to get rid of sacredness, to become an objective, and later, an experimental science. This also allowed her to stand out as an independent science, separating her subject, her field of study from the subject of philosophy. On the other hand, this approach began to hinder the development of psychology, therefore, by the middle of the 19th century. it has been revised.

Thanks to the development of biology, including the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin, the works of G. Spencer and other researchers, psychology not only moved away from philosophy, identifying itself with natural disciplines, but also expanded its subject, deriving it, as I.M. Sechenov, "from the field of consciousness into the field of behavior." Thus, in addition to cognitive processes, behavior and emotional processes were included in the subject of psychology. It is important that the desire to become an objective science has not yet led to the emergence of new methods for studying the psyche, since until the 80s of the XIX century. introspection remains the leading one.

The most important stage in the development of psychology is associated with the emergence of the experimental laboratory of W. Wundt, who made psychology not only an independent, but also an objective, experimental science. However, the associative approach, on the basis of which W. Wundt built his model of psychology, could no longer explain the new facts of mental life, could not be extended to the study of personality structure, emotional experiences, and human creative activity. The use of those experiments and tests that existed in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century was also limited.

This made scientists look for a new subject and new methods for studying the psyche. The first schools that emerged at that time (structuralism, functionalism, the Würzburg school) did not last long. However, they showed that among psychologists there is no longer a consensus about what and how psychology should study. This was the beginning of a period of searching for psychology adequate to the new situation and the requirements of the time, which was called the period of methodological crisis (see Table 1).

The inability to come to a common point of view led to the fact that already in the 10-30s of the XX century. psychology was divided into several directions, each of which had its own subject and its own method of researching what was understood by this psychological direction as the psyche. So, in psychology there are: depth psychology, behaviorism, gestalt psychology, Marxist psychology, as well as schools such as French sociological, or understanding, psychology.

In the second half of the XX century. new schools and directions are emerging - humanistic psychology, genetic (or epistemological) psychology, as well as cognitive psychology, which was formed already in the 60s. This is the last one to appear in the XX century. psychological school. Thus, we can say that from the middle of the XX century. psychology has entered the modern stage of its development, which is no longer characterized by fragmentation into all new schools, but a tendency towards unification.

3. Regularities of the historical and psychological process

The general and basic pattern of the development of psychological scientific knowledge is the struggle of ideas, primarily between the materialistic and idealistic understanding of the psyche.

The materialistic approach is aimed at a causal explanation of the psyche. Already in antiquity, in line with this approach, ideas about the conditioning of mental phenomena by material processes of the brain arose and developed in all subsequent times. The development of materialistic ideas is closely related to advances in natural science. They reach their highest form in psychology based on the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism.

In various forms of idealism, the psyche and consciousness were separated from the processes of the material world, separated from it, turned into a special - spiritual - substance, which, in its origin, and in its properties, and in methods of cognition, was opposed to the material world and practice. In idealism, the psyche appears as a special spiritual activity, detached from all material connections, studied abstractly, "... since idealism, of course, does not know real, sensory activity as such."

The division of psychology into materialistic and idealistic runs through the entire history of the development of psychology up to the present time. Moreover, each of the directions contributes to the knowledge of the mental. Thus, idealistic concepts focus on the problem of the qualitative uniqueness of the psyche, in contrast to material processes, and carry out the idea of ​​the active active nature of the spirit. Attention to these aspects of psychic reality is a progressive fact. Therefore, the study of idealistic psychological concepts, although they do not reveal the real ways of knowing the revealed patterns, is an integral part of the course in the history of psychology. An important regularity in the development of psychological science is its focus on the development of a unified theory. This tendency was especially acute during the period of an open crisis in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century. when "psychology realized that it was a matter of life and death for it to find a common explanatory principle ...". The new directions that emerged at that time (psychoanalysis, behaviorism, gestalt psychology, etc.) claimed just such a theory. Analyzing their fate, Vygotsky revealed a natural general line in their development: from private discoveries in a specific area to the emergence of general principles and their spread to the whole of psychology and, finally, transformation into a philosophical system and even into a worldview, showing that none of these principles does not satisfy the status of the only theory in psychology. However, the objective need for it remains an important driving force of the historical process.

Attempts are being made to apply to the history of psychology the concept of the development of science by T. Kuhn, to use other achievements in the field of philosophy of science.

The history of psychology must also take into account the special situation in science in the period under study. The fact of the relationship between psychology and other sciences characterizes its development at all stages of history. The influences of mathematics, physics, astronomy, linguistics, physiology, biology, ethnography, logic, and other sciences on psychology are varied. First, within the framework of these sciences, knowledge about mental phenomena was accumulated (for example, the study of the problem of the connection between language and thinking in the works of linguists A. Potebnya, V. Humboldt and others, the study of reaction time by astronomers, etc.). Secondly, the methods of these sciences were used in psychology, in particular, the experiment was borrowed by W. Wundt from the physiology of the sense organs, psychophysics and psychometrics. Third, there was the use of scientific methodology. So, the development of mechanics in the 17th and 18th centuries. caused the emergence of a mechanistic model of animal (and partly human) behavior by R. Descartes, the mechanistic concept of associations by D. Gartley, “mental physics” by J. Mill. The interaction of psychology with other sciences continues today.

4. The principles of historical and psychological analysis

The most important of these is the principle of historicism... He demands "not to forget the main historical connection, to look at each issue from the point of view of how a certain phenomenon in history arose, what main stages in its development this phenomenon took place, and from the point of view of its development, look at what this thing has become now."

In historical research, this principle becomes fundamental. It requires the historian to consider this or that segment of the past in the entirety of its concrete content, in the system of corresponding sociocultural conditions, as determined by the general situation in science and considered in comparison with previous knowledge. This allows you to show the originality and uniqueness of the phenomenon under study. In this case, it is necessary “to take not individual facts, but the entire totality of facts related to the issue under consideration, without a single exception, because otherwise suspicion and quite legitimate suspicion inevitably arises that the facts were chosen or selected arbitrarily, that instead of an objective connection and interdependence of historical phenomena as a whole, subjective concoction is presented. " There should be no blank spots in history, oblivion of certain historical events or persons.

An assessment of the past is made in accordance with the principle of historicism. At the same time, the inevitable limitations of any stage in the development of knowledge should be revealed in comparison with its later stages. This is how outstanding representatives of science assessed their predecessors (see, for example, I.P. Pavlov's assessments of the teachings of Hippocrates about temperaments, the concept of the reflex of R. Descartes, etc.). Violations of the principle of historicism in understanding the past are presentism and antiquarism. Presentism limits historical research only to the fact that it has significance for the present stage of the development of science and, instead of studying the historical process of the development of science in its entirety, focuses on identifying only those fragments of its content that are most consistent with modern views. Presentism leads to the modernization of the historical process and contradicts the principle of historicism.

Contradicts him and antiquarianism - an approach that considers the past history, regardless of the tasks of the present, as something frozen, petrified. This "pure history" turns into a simple registration of events in their temporal sequence and does not fit into the practice of modern scientific research.

A deviation from the principle of historicism is the one-sidedness and schematism of depicting the events of past history. At the same time, the requirement of integrity and concreteness, presented to historical thought, not only does not exclude, but necessarily presupposes the identification of a general pattern in the phenomenon under study. The fulfillment of this requirement is ensured by relying on the principle of the unity of the logical and the historical, according to which the historian should not only describe this or that stage of historically developing knowledge, but also present it theoretically and, therefore, reveal something permanent in it. For example, behind the historically limited empirical material of specific knowledge about the psyche in antiquity, hidden in it (almost all) of the most important problems of psychology are revealed. On the other hand, adherence to the principle of the unity of the logical and the historical warns against the absolutization of historically limited truths and allows one to assess their actual meaning.

In the formation of a scientific picture of mental life, a key role belongs to the principle of determinism... The principle of determinism requires the historian to be able to reveal the method of causal explanation of the mental as determined by the factors that generate it (everything has causes and effects). The principles of historical and psychological research. in combination with specific methods form the basis of a scientific analysis of the historical path of development of "psychology."

They also distinguish:

consistency principle ;

principle of constructive-positive analysis- it is necessary to look for the advanced, the achievements of the historical era;

the principle of periodization and continuity of the development of psychological knowledge- presupposes the presence of qualitatively different periods in the dynamics of a single process of scientific cognition;

the principle of the unity of the past, present and future ;

the principle of the unity of collective and individual creativity in the development of psychological knowledge- the contribution of an individual scientist or a team of scientists cannot be ignored.

5. Methods of the history of psychology

The methods used in historical psychological research, of course, differ from the methods of general psychology. Practically none of the basic methods of psychological science can be used in the history of psychology - neither observation, nor testing, nor experiment. The field of application of these methods is limited only by a narrow circle of modern (for the historian of psychology) scientists and by the present state of the problems relevant for this time, while the age of psychological science is measured in centuries.

Therefore, scientists studying the history of psychology develop their own research methods or borrow them from related disciplines - science of science, history, sociology. These methods are adequate to the task of not only recreating the history of the development of a separate psychological direction, but also including it in the general context of psychological science, historical situation and culture. So, in the history of psychology are used historical genetic method, according to which the study of the ideas of the past is impossible without taking into account the general logic of the development of science in a certain historical period, and historical-functional method, thanks to which the continuity of the expressed ideas is analyzed. Are of great importance biographical method, allowing to identify possible causes and conditions for the formation of scientific views of the scientist, as well as the method of systematizing psychological statements.

In recent decades, more and more applications are found categorical analysis methods, introduced by the famous historian of science M. Blok. In our country, this approach was developed within the framework of the historical psychology of science by M.G. Yaroshevsky. It involves taking into account the socio-historical conditions that determined the emergence and development of this scientific school, as well as the study of ideogenesis, cognitive style, the opponent's circle, social perception and other determinants that led to the emergence of ideas that are significant for psychology.

The sources for the history of psychology are primarily the works of scientists, archival materials, memories of their lives and activities, as well as the analysis of historical and sociological materials and even fiction that helps to recreate the spirit of a certain time.

1st group: Methods of planning historical and psychological research - organizational methods:

1. Structural-analytical method

2. Comparative method

3. Genetic method

2nd group: Methods for collecting and interpreting factual material:

2. Analysis of activity products

3rd group:

1. Methods of historical reconstruction

2. Problem analysis

4th group:

1. Method of librarian analysis

2. Thematic analysis

Separately:

1. Method of source analysis

2. Biographical method

3. Interview method

6. The materialistic doctrine of the soul in ancient psychology

The emergence of psychology in Ancient Greece at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC. was associated with the need for the formation of an objective science about man, which considered the soul not on the basis of fairy tales, myths, legends, but with the use of those objective knowledge (mathematical, medical, philosophical) that arose at that period. The first ideas about the soul, which arose on the basis of myths and early religious concepts, highlighted some of the functions of the soul, primarily the energetic one, which encourages the body to be active. These ideas formed the basis for the research of the first psychologists. Already the first works showed that the soul not only encourages action, but also regulates the activity of the individual, and is also the main tool in the knowledge of the world. These judgments about the properties of the soul became the leading ones in subsequent years. Thus, the most important for psychology in the ancient period was the study of how the soul gives activity to the body, how it regulates human behavior and how it learns the world. An analysis of the laws governing the development of nature led the thinkers of that time to the idea that the soul is material, i.e. consists of the same particles as the surrounding world.

Everything in the world has its fundamental principle - an element that is the first and main component of all objects, arche... Studies of the surrounding world led scientists of the 7th-5th centuries. BC. to the idea that arche is the element without which the world and everything in it cannot exist, therefore, like everything in nature, this vital element must be material. So, Thales (VI century BC), whose concept was influenced by the views of the Egyptians, believed that the fundamental principle, the soul, is water, since water (for example, the Nile, on which crops depended) is the basis of life. Anaximenes (5th century BC) considered air to be an eternally moving and eternally living principle. It should be noted that the views of ancient Greek scientists were influenced by a variety of philosophical and psychological concepts, including the ancient Indian Vedas, in particular, the doctrine that the most important property (prana) of life is breathing (dyad - atman-brahman). A reflection of these ideas can be seen in the theory of Anaximenes and other Greek scholars who linked arche to breath, air, and wind. The idea that pneuma (air, movement) is one of the components of the soul can be traced at a later time, for example, in the concept of Epicurus.

The prevalence of opinion about the materiality of the soul is confirmed by the fact that at the very beginning of the development of psychology, scientists considered the main quality of the soul to be activity, i.e. argued that the soul is primarily the energy basis of the body, which sets an inert, passive body in motion. In this way, the soul is the source of life based on activity .

Somewhat later, the idea arose that a specific material object (water, earth or air), even very important for the world and life, cannot be the fundamental principle. Already Anaximander (VI century BC) wrote about the "infinite", i.e. about such a physical principle, from which everything arises and into which everything turns. In the theories of Leucippus and Democritus (V-IV centuries BC), the idea of ​​atoms, the smallest particles invisible to the world, arose from which everything around is composed. The atomic theory developed by these scientists was very widespread and was an integral part of the psychological teachings of many scientists not only in ancient Greece, but also in Rome. Considering the soul a source of activity for the body, Democritus and the scientists who followed him argued that it consists of the smallest and roundest atoms, which are the most active and mobile.

No less important for the development of psychology was the idea expressed by Heraclitus that everything in the world operates according to certain laws, according to the Logos, which is the main governing force. Logos also explains the relationship between individual events, including between different episodes in people's lives. Thus, everything in the world is causally conditioned, all events do not just happen, by chance, but according to a certain law, although we can not always establish this connection, the cause of the event that happened can be established. This approach, called, as it was said in the previous chapter, determinism, showed the possibilities of understanding and explaining what is happening in the world and in man, opened up new perspectives for science. Thus, the idea of ​​the Logos has become a very important factor on the way to overcome sacredness and turn psychology into a science.

From about the 3rd century. BC. psychologists began to be more interested not so much in the general laws and functions of the soul, as in the content of the human soul. It was not the laws common to all mental that began to come to the fore, but the study of what distinguishes a person from other living beings. The idea of ​​the predominantly energetic function of the soul has ceased to satisfy psychology, since the soul is a source of energy not only for humans, but also for other living beings. At this time, scientists came to the conclusion that the human soul serves as a source not only of activity, but also of reason and morality. This new understanding of the soul was laid down in the theory of Socrates, and then developed in the concepts of Plato and Aristotle.

For the first time in these concepts of the psyche, the idea appeared that the most important factor influencing the human psyche is culture. If psychologists associated activity with certain material factors, then reason and morality were understood as products of cultural development, as a result of the spiritual work of not one person, but of the people as a whole. This was especially evident in the theory of Aristotle. Naturally, the factor of culture could not affect the psyche of animals and related only to the human soul, providing its qualitative difference. Thus, the change in the priorities of psychological research, the emergence of new concepts of the soul became an important turning point in the development of psychology.

It was impossible to explain from the point of view of science (biology, physics, medicine) of that time how the structure of the atoms of the human soul leads to its qualitative, and not only quantitative, difference from the soul of the animal. Therefore, psychological concepts during this period moved from a materialistic orientation to an idealistic one. The difference between materialism and idealism in psychology is mainly associated with a different understanding of the content of the soul, psyche; in the last materialism distinguishes primarily activity, the material nature of which was obvious to scientists of that time, and idealism - also reason and morality, the nature of which was impossible to explain by material laws. Therefore, the disciple of Socrates Plato came to the idea of ​​immateriality and eternity of the soul.

7. The idealistic doctrine of Socrates and Plato

Socrates: Know Yourself... The son of a sculptor and midwife, he, having received a common education for the Athenians of that time, became a philosopher who discussed the problems of the theory of knowledge, ethics, politics, pedagogy with any person who agreed to answer his questions anywhere - on the street, in the market square, at any time. Socrates, unlike the sophists, did not take money for philosophizing, and among his listeners were people of the most varied property status, education, political convictions, ideological and moral makeup. The meaning of Socrates' activity (it was named "Dialectics" - finding truth through conversation) was to help the interlocutor find the true answer (the so-called Socratic method) with the help of a certain way of selected questions and thereby bring him from vague ideas to a logically clear knowledge of the subjects under discussion. A wide range of "everyday concepts" about justice, injustice, goodness, beauty, courage, etc. were discussed.

Socrates considered it his duty to take an active part in the public life of Athens. At the same time, he did not always agree with the opinion of the majority in the national assembly and in the jury, which required a lot of courage, especially during the reign of the “thirty tyrants”. Socrates considered his disagreement with the majority to be the result of the fact that he always strived for the observance of laws and justice, which most people do not always care about. He was accused of “not honoring the gods and corrupting youth,” and sentenced to death by 361 votes out of 500 judges. Socrates courageously accepted the verdict, drinking poison and rejecting the plans of his disciples to escape as salvation.

Socrates did not write down his reasoning, believing that only live conversation leads to the desired result - the upbringing of the individual. Therefore, it is difficult to completely reconstruct his views, which we know from the three main sources of the comedies of Aristophanes, the memoirs of Xenophon and the writings of Plato. All these authors emphasize that it was Socrates who first considered the soul primarily as a source of human morality, and not as a source of body activity (as was customary in the theories of Heraclitus and Democritus). Socrates said that the soul is a mental quality of the individual, characteristic of him as a rational being, acting in accordance with moral ideals. Such an approach to the soul could not proceed from the idea of ​​its materiality, and therefore, simultaneously with the emergence of a view of the connection between the soul and morality, a new look at it arises, which was later developed by Socrates' disciple Plato.

Talking about morality, Socrates associated it with human behavior. Morality is a good that is realized in the actions of people... However, in order to evaluate this or that deed as moral, one must first know what good is. Therefore, Socrates linked morality with reason, believing that virtue consists in the knowledge of good and in action in accordance with this knowledge. For example, the brave person is the one who knows how to behave in danger and acts according to his knowledge. Therefore, first of all, it is necessary to educate people, show them the difference between good and bad, and then evaluate their behavior. Knowing the difference between good and evil, a person begins to know himself. Thus, Socrates comes to the most important position of his views, associated with the transfer of the center of research interests from the surrounding reality to a person.

Socrates's motto was: "Know thyself." Under the knowledge of oneself, Socrates meant not turning "inward" - to one's own experiences and states of consciousness (the very concept of consciousness had not yet been isolated by that time), but the analysis of actions and attitudes towards them, moral assessments and norms of human behavior in various life situations. This led to a new understanding of the essence of the soul.

If the sophists took the attitude of man not to nature, but to other people as a starting point, then for Socrates, the most important is the attitude of man to himself as the bearer of intellectual and moral qualities. Subsequently, they even said that Socrates was a pioneer of psychotherapy, trying with the help of words to reveal what is hidden behind the external manifestations of the work of the mind.

In any case, his method contained ideas that played a key role in the psychological studies of thinking over the centuries. First, the work of thought was made dependent on the task, which creates an obstacle to its usual course. It was this task that became the system of questions that Socrates rained down on the interlocutor, thereby awakening his mental activity. Secondly, this activity was originally in the character of a dialogue. Both signs: a) the direction of thought created by the task, and b) dialogism, which assumes that cognition is initially social, since it is rooted in the communication of subjects, became the main guidelines of experimental psychology of thinking in the 20th century.

We know about this philosopher, who has become for all ages the ideal of disinterestedness, honesty, independence of thought, from the words of his students. He himself never wrote anything and considered himself not a teacher of wisdom, but a person who awakened in others the desire for truth.

After Socrates, whose center of interest was mainly the mental activity (its products and values) of the individual subject, the concept of the soul was filled with a new objective content. It was composed of very special entities, which the physical nature does not know.

The ideas put forward by Socrates were developed in the theory of his outstanding student Plato.

Plato: the soul and the realm of ideas... Plato (428–348 BC) was born into a noble Athenian family. His versatile abilities began to manifest very early and served as the basis for many legends, the most common of which attributes to him a divine origin (making him the son of Apollo). Plato's real name is Aristocles, but even in his youth he receives a new name - Plato, which means broad-shouldered (in his early years he was fond of gymnastics). Plato possessed a poetic gift, his philosophical works are written in a highly literary language, there are many artistic descriptions and metaphors in them. However, the fascination with philosophy, the ideas of Socrates, whose student he becomes in Athens, distracted Plato from the original intention to devote his life to poetry. Plato carried his loyalty to philosophy and his great mentor throughout his life. After the tragic death of Socrates, Plato leaves Athens, vowing never to return to this city.

His travels lasted about ten years and ended tragically - he was sold into slavery by the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius, who first called on Plato to help him in building an ideal state. Friends of Plato, having learned about this, collected the amount necessary for the ransom, but Plato had already been released by this time. Then the collected money was handed over to Plato, and he bought a piece of land in the northwestern outskirts of Athens and founded his own school there, which he called the Academy. Already in his old years, Plato makes a second attempt to participate in state affairs, trying to create an ideal state already together with the son of Dionysius - Dionysius the Younger, however, this attempt also ended in failure. Disappointment in the environment darkened the last years of Plato's life, although he was until the end of his days surrounded by many students and followers, among whom was Aristotle.

In particular to the deification of a number. Above the gates of Plato's Academy was written: "He who does not know geometry, let him not enter here." In an effort to create a universal concept that unites man and space, Plato believed that the surrounding objects are the result of the union of the soul, idea, with inanimate matter.

Plato believed that there is an ideal world in which souls, or ideas, things are located, those perfect models that become prototypes of real objects. The perfection of these patterns is beyond the reach of objects, but makes one strive to be like them. Thus, the soul is not only an idea, but also the goal of the real thing. In principle, Plato's idea is a general concept that does not exist in real life, but which is reflected in all the things included in this concept. So, there is no generalized person, but each of the people is, as it were, a variation of the concept of “person”.

Since the concept is invariable, then the idea , or the soul, from the point of view of Plato, is constant, unchanging and immortal... She is the keeper of human morality. As a rationalist, Plato believed that behavior should be prompted and directed by reason, not feelings, and opposed Democritus and his theory of determinism, arguing the possibility of human freedom, the freedom of his rational behavior. The soul, according to Plato, consists of three parts: lustful, passionate and reasonable... Lustful and passionate souls must obey the rational, which alone can make behavior moral. In his dialogues, Plato likens the soul to a chariot drawn by two horses. The black horse - a lusting soul - does not listen to orders and needs constant rein, as it seeks to overturn the chariot, throw it into the abyss. The white horse is a passionate soul, although it tries to go its own way, but it does not always obey the driver and needs constant supervision. And, finally, Plato identifies the rational part of the soul with the driver, who seeks the right path and directs the chariot along it, driving the horse. In describing the soul, Plato adheres to clear black and white criteria, proving that there are bad and good parts of the soul: the rational part for him is unambiguously good, while the lustful and passionate part is bad, lower.

Since the soul is permanent and a person cannot change it, then the content of the knowledge that is stored in the soul is also invariable, and the discoveries made by a person are, in fact, not discoveries of something new, but only the awareness of what has already been stored in soul. Thus, Plato understood the process of thinking as a recollection of what the soul knew in its cosmic life, but forgot when it entered the body. And thinking itself, which he considered the main cognitive process, is essentially reproductive thinking, not creative thinking (although Plato operates with the concept of "intuition" leading to creative thinking).

The very process of cognition in Plato, as already mentioned, was presented in the form of recollection; thus, memory was the repository of all knowledge, both conscious and unconscious at the moment.

Plato develops the ideas of Socrates, proving that thinking is a dialogue of the soul with itself (in modern terms, inner speech). However, the process of logical thinking, deployed in time and consciously, cannot convey the entire completeness of knowledge, since it relies on the study of surrounding objects, that is, copies of real knowledge about objects. Nevertheless, a person has the opportunity to penetrate into the essence of things, and it is associated with intuitive thinking, with penetration into the depths of the soul, which stores true knowledge. They open up to a person immediately, entirely. (This instantaneous process is similar to "insight," which will later be described by Gestalt psychology).

Plato's research laid new trends not only in philosophy, but also in psychology . He first identified the stages in the process of cognition, discovering the role of inner speech and the activity of thinking. He also for the first time presented the soul not as an integral organization, but as a certain structure that is under pressure from opposite tendencies, conflicting motives that cannot always be reconciled with the help of reason. (This idea of ​​Plato's about the inner conflict of the soul will become especially relevant in psychoanalysis, while his approach to the problem of knowledge will be reflected in the position of rationalists.)

8. The doctrine of the soul of Aristotle

Aristotle: the soul is a way of organizing the body... Aristotle (384–322 BC) opened a new era in the understanding of the soul as a subject of psychological knowledge. Its source for Aristotle was not physical bodies and disembodied ideas, but an organism, where the physical and the spiritual form an inseparable whole. The soul, according to Aristotle, is not an independent entity, but a form, a way of organizing a living body. This ended both the naive animistic dualism and the sophisticated dualism of Plato.

Aristotle was the son of a physician under the Macedonian king and was preparing himself for the medical profession. Appearing as a seventeen-year-old youth in Athens to the sixty-year-old Plato, he studied at his Academy for several years, with which he later broke. The famous painting by Raphael "The School of Athens" depicts Plato pointing his hand at the sky. Aristotle - to the ground. These images capture the difference in orientation of the two great thinkers. According to Aristotle, the ideological wealth of the world is hidden in sensually perceived earthly things and is revealed in direct communication with them.

On the outskirts of Athens, Aristotle created his own school, called Lyceum (later the word "lyceum" began to call privileged educational institutions). It was a covered gallery where Aristotle, usually walking, taught classes. "Those who think correctly," said Aristotle to his disciples, "who think that the soul cannot exist without a body and is not a body."

Who, then, was meant by those who “think correctly”? Obviously, not natural philosophers, for whom the soul is the subtlest body. But not Plato, who considered the soul a pilgrim, wandering through bodies and other worlds. The decisive result of Aristotle's reflections: “The soul cannot be separated from the body” - contradicted Plato's views on the past and future of the soul. It turns out that Aristotle considered his own understanding to be "correct", according to which it is not the soul that experiences, thinks, learns, but an integral organism. "To say that the soul is angry," he wrote, "is tantamount to saying that the soul is engaged in weaving or building a house."

Aristotle was both a philosopher and a naturalist-researcher of nature. At one time he taught the sciences to the young Alexander the Great, who later ordered to send his old teacher samples of plants and animals from the conquered countries.

A huge amount of comparative anatomical, zoological, embryological and other facts were accumulated, which became the experimental basis for observing and analyzing the behavior of living beings. The generalization of these facts, primarily biological, became the basis of the psychological teachings of Aristotle and the transformation of the main explanatory principles of psychology: organization, regularity, causality.

The very term "organism" itself requires to consider it from the point of view of organization, that is, the ordering of the whole in order to achieve a goal or to solve a problem. The structure of this whole and its work (function) are inseparable. “If the eye were a living being, his soul would be sight,” said Aristotle.

The soul was thought by Aristotle as a way of organizing a living body, the actions of which are expedient. He considered the soul inherent in all living organisms (including plants) and subject to objective, experimental study. It cannot exist without a body and at the same time is not a body. The soul cannot be separated from the body .

The starting point for life is nutrition as the assimilation of external things. Aristotle extended this general explanatory principle to other levels of the soul's activity, primarily to sensory impressions, to the ability to feel, which he interprets as a special assimilation of the sense organ to an external object. However, here, in contrast to nutrition, it is not the material substance that is assimilated, but the form of the object.

The soul has various abilities as stages of its development: vegetable, sensual and mental (inherent only in humans). In relation to the explanation of the soul, Aristotle, contrary to his postulate of the inseparability of the soul and the body capable of life, believed that the mind in its highest, essential expression is something different from the body. The hierarchy of levels of cognitive activity ended with the "supreme mind", which did not mix with anything corporeal and external.

The beginning of cognition is the sensory ability. It captures the shape of things, just as "wax takes a seal without iron and gold." In this process of assimilating a living body to external objects, Aristotle attached great importance to a special central organ called the "common sensory". This center cognizes the qualities common to all sensations - movement, size, figure, etc. Thanks to it, it becomes possible for the subject to differentiate the modalities of sensations (color, taste, smell).

The central organ of the soul, Aristotle considered not the brain, but the heart, connected with the senses and movements through the circulation of blood. The organism captures external impressions in the form of images of "fantasy" (this meant representations of memory and imagination). They are combined according to the laws of association of three types - contiguity (if two impressions followed each other, then later one of them causes the other), similarity and contrast. (These laws discovered by Aristotle became the basis of the direction, which later received the name of associative psychology.)

Aristotle adhered, in modern terms, to a systematic approach, since he considered a living body and its abilities as a purposefully operating system. His important contribution is also the confirmation of the idea of ​​development, for he taught that the ability of the highest level arises on the basis of the previous, more elementary one. Aristotle correlated the development of an individual organism with the development of the entire animal world. In an individual person, during his transformation from an infant into a mature being, the steps that the organic world went through in its history are repeated. In this generalization, an idea was laid in its embryonic form, which was later called a biological law.

Aristotle distinguished between theoretical and practical reason. The principle of this distinction was the distinction between the functions of thinking. Knowledge as such does not in itself make a person moral. His virtues do not depend on knowledge and not on nature, which only potentially endows the individual with inclinations, from which his qualities can develop in the future. They are formed in real actions that give a person a certain coinage. This is also due to the way he relates to his feelings (affects).

Aristotle was the first to talk about the nature of upbringing and the need to correlate pedagogical methods with the level of mental development of the child. He proposed a periodization, the basis of which was the structure of the soul he had allocated. He divided his childhood into three periods: up to 7 years, from 7 to 14 and from 14 to 21 years. For each of these periods, a specific education system must be developed. For example, talking about preschool age. Aristotle emphasized that during this period the formation of the plant soul is of paramount importance; therefore, for young children, the daily routine, proper nutrition, hygiene are of such importance. Schoolchildren need to develop other properties, in particular, movement (with the help of gymnastic exercises), sensations, memory, aspirations. Moral education should be based on exercise in moral deeds.

If Plato considered feeling to be evil, then Aristotle, on the contrary, wrote about the importance of educating the feelings of children, emphasizing the need for moderation and a reasonable correlation of feelings with the environment. He attributed great importance to affects that arise independently of the will of a person and the struggle with which the power of reason alone is impossible. So he emphasized the role of art... Especially dramatic art, which, by evoking appropriate emotions in viewers and listeners, contributes to catharsis, i.e. purification from affect, at the same time teaching both children and adults the culture of feelings.

Speaking about morality, Plato emphasized that only absolutely correct and perfect behavior is moral, and any deviations from the rule, even with the best goals, are already a misdemeanor.

Unlike him Aristotle emphasized the importance of the very desire for moral behavior... Thus, he encouraged the child's attempts, albeit unsuccessful, to "be good", thereby creating additional motivation.

So, Aristotle transformed the key explanatory principles of psychology: consistency (organization), development, determinism. For Aristotle, the soul is not a special entity, but a way of organizing a living body, which is a system, the soul goes through different stages in development and is able not only to capture what affects the body at the moment, but also to conform to the future goal.

Aristotle discovered and studied many specific mental phenomena. But there are no "pure facts" in science. Any fact is seen differently depending on the theoretical point of view, on the categories and explanatory schemes with which the researcher is armed. Having enriched the explanatory principles, Aristotle presented a completely different picture of the structure, functions and development of the soul compared to his predecessors.

His work "On the Soul" is rightfully considered the first psychological monograph. This book not only summarized everything that was done by the predecessors of Aristotle, but also built psychological knowledge into a new system, opened up new perspectives for science, posing questions that many generations of psychologists have sought to answer.

9. The doctrine of ancient doctors

Hippocrates: Teaching About Temperaments. The Hippocratic School (c. 460–377 BC), known to us from the so-called "Hippocratic Collection", viewed life as a changing process. Among its explanatory principles, we find air in the role of a force that maintains the inseparable connection of the organism with the world, brings intelligence from the outside, and performs mental functions in the brain. The single material principle was rejected as the basis of organic life. If a person were one, then he would never get sick, and if he was sick, then the healing remedy would have to be one. But that doesn't exist.

Hippocrates replaced the doctrine of a single element underlying the diversity of things with the doctrine of four liquids (blood, mucus, yellow bile and black bile). Hence, depending on which liquid predominates, there is a version of four temperaments, named hereinafter: sanguine (when blood predominates), phlegmatic (mucus), choleric (yellow bile) and melancholic (black bile).

For the future scientific psychology, this explanatory principle, for all its naivety, was very important (not without reason the terminology of Hippocrates has survived to this day). First, the hypothesis was put forward that the innumerable differences between people can be grouped according to several common characteristics of behavior; thereby laid the foundations of scientific typology that underlie modern teachings about individual differences between people. Secondly, Hippocrates sought the source and cause of the differences within the organism; mental qualities were made dependent on bodily qualities. The role of the nervous system in that era was not yet known, therefore the typology was, in today's language, humoral (from the Latin "humor" - liquid).

Alcmaeon: the brain is the organ of the soul... The humoral orientation of the thinking of the ancient Greek physicians did not at all mean that they ignored the structure of organs specially designed to perform mental functions. Since ancient times, both in the East and in Greece, two theories "heart-centered" and "brain-centered" competed with each other.

The idea that the brain is an organ of the soul belongs to the ancient Greek physician Alcmeon from Cretona (VI century BC), who came to this conclusion as a result of observations and surgical operations. In particular, he found that from the cerebral hemispheres "two narrow pathways go to the eye sockets." Believing that the sensation arises due to the special structure of the peripheral sensory apparatuses, Alcmeon at the same time argued that there is a direct connection between the senses and the brain.

Thus, the doctrine of the psyche as a product of the brain originated due to the fact that the direct dependence of sensations on the structure of the brain was discovered, and this, in turn, became possible due to the accumulation of empirical facts. Sensations, according to Alcmeon, are the starting point of all cognitive work. "The brain delivers (to us) the sensations of hearing, sight and smell, from the latter, memory and representation (opinion) arise, and from memory and representation, which have reached unshakable strength, knowledge is born, which is such by virtue of this (strength)."

Thus, other mental processes arising from sensations were also associated with the brain, although knowledge about these processes (in contrast to knowledge about sensations) could not rely on anatomical and physiological experience.

Following Alcmeon, Hippocrates also interpreted the brain as an organ of the psyche, believing that it is a large gland.

It should be noted that in the 20th century, scientists turned to studies of both nervous processes and body fluids, its hormones (the Greek word for what excites). Now both physicians and psychologists are talking about a single neurohumoral regulation of behavior.

Alexandrian science... In the Hellenistic period, new cultural centers arose, where various currents of Eastern thought interacted with Western ones. Among these centers, the ones created in Egypt in the 3rd century BC stood out. (during the royal dynasty of the Ptolemies, founded by one of the commanders of Alexander the Great), the library and Musa in Alexandria. Musay was essentially a research institute, where research was carried out in various fields of knowledge, including anatomy and physiology.

So, doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus, whose works have not survived, significantly improved the technique of studying the body, in particular, the brain. Among the most important discoveries made by them are the establishment of differences between sensory and motor nerves; more than two thousand years later, this discovery formed the basis of the doctrine of reflexes, which is most important for physiology and psychology.

Galen... Another great researcher of mental life in connection with bodily life was the ancient Roman physician Galen (2nd century AD). He wrote over 400 treatises on philosophy and medicine, of which about 100 have survived (mainly on medicine). Galen synthesized the achievements of ancient psychophysiology into a detailed system that served as the basis for ideas about the human body over the next centuries. In his work "On Parts of the Human Body", relying on many observations and experiments and generalizing the knowledge of physicians from the East and West, including those of Alexandria, he described the dependence of the vital activity of the whole organism on the nervous system.

In those days, the anatomy of human bodies was prohibited, all experiments were performed on animals. But Lolets, operating on gladiators (slaves whom the Romans did not actually consider people), was able to expand medical ideas about a person, primarily about his brain, where, as he believed, the "highest grade" of pneuma as a carrier of reason was produced and stored.

The doctrine of temperaments as proportions, in which several basic "juices" are mixed, have been widely known for many centuries, developed by Galen (following Hippocrates). He called temperament with a predominance of "warm" courageous and energetic, a predominance of "cold" - slow, etc.

Galen paid much attention to affects. Even Aristotle wrote that, for example, anger can be explained either by interpersonal relationships (the desire to avenge an offense), or by "boiling blood" in the body. Galen argued that changes in the body ("increased warmth of the heart") are primary in affects; the desire to take revenge a second time. Many centuries later, discussions between psychologists will re-emerge around the question of the atom, which is primarily a subjective experience or bodily shock.

10. Features of the development of psychology in the Middle Ages

The era of the Middle Ages, which lasted almost ten centuries, does not have a sufficiently clear periodization in history. The beginning of this era is considered to be the fall of the Roman Empire, i.e. V century. At the same time, all scientists note that elements of medieval ideology, as well as medieval science, appeared much earlier, already in the 3rd century. The choice of the 5th century is also conditioned by the fact that during this period the new world Christian religion finally took root in Europe.

The end of the medieval period is usually associated with the 15th century, with the time of the revival of art, secular science, and the discovery of America. At the same time, the first signs of a new ideology appeared by the end of the 14th century, and it is possible to speak of the final departure of the medieval worldview only by the end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th centuries, after the Reformation.

One of the most important characteristics of medieval science, psychology in particular, was its close relationship with religion. Precisely speaking, non-theological, non-church science at that time did not exist in Europe. Its important feature during this period was the emergence of sacredness, from which psychology got rid of during the transition from mythology to scientific knowledge in the 7th – 6th centuries. BC. Dependence on religion again raised the question of the connection and mutual influence of knowledge and faith, which became the most important for scientists throughout this period.

Close contact and dependence on theology give reason to use the stages of development of religious thought, in which they distinguish stage of apologetics, historically prior to the Middle Ages (II-IV centuries), the stage of patristics (IV-VIII centuries) and the stage of scholasticism (XI-XIV centuries).

The beginning of a new stage in the development of psychology was associated with an actual change in its subject, since theology became the official science of the soul. Therefore, psychology had to either completely yield to theology the study of the psyche, or find itself some niche for research. It was in connection with the search for opportunities to study a single subject in its various aspects that the main changes took place in the relationship between theology and psychology.

With the emergence of Christianity, he needed to prove his uniqueness and push back other religions that are not compatible with him. Associated with this is intolerance to Greek mythology, as well as to psychological and philosophical concepts that were closely associated with pagan religion and myths. Therefore, most of the well-known psychological schools (Lyceum, the Academy, the Garden of Epicurus, etc.) were closed by the 6th century, and scientists who preserved knowledge of ancient science moved to Asia Minor, opening new schools there in the Greek colonies. Islam, widespread in the East, was not so intolerant of other faith as Christianity in the 3rd-6th centuries, and therefore psychological schools developed freely there. Later, by the 9th-10th centuries, when the persecution of ancient science, especially the theory of Plato and Aristotle, ended, many concepts returned to Europe, some already in a reverse translation from Arabic.

At the stage of apologetics another reason for the antagonism between psychology and theology was the incompatibility of knowledge and faith, which did not tolerate any dissent, no doubt about its dogmas. The Church at that time severely condemned not only those who doubted its truths, but even those who tried to prove them, believing that the desire to prove comes from a lack of faith. It was not for nothing that it was at this time that the famous theologian Tertullian's statement appeared: "I believe, for it is absurd."

However, after the consolidation of the domination of the Christian church, by the 5th-6th centuries, it became necessary to make additions, clarifications or transform some provisions of Christianity. It was also necessary to canonize the postulates arising from the new realities in order to prevent the spread of heresy that would bring schism to the church. So there was new stage - patristics, i.e. the teaching of the church fathers, in which theology begins to turn to the knowledge accumulated in antiquity.

From this time and almost until the XII-XIII centuries. the relationship between church and science is changing again, with the church becoming one of the main custodians and disseminators of knowledge.

To understand the role of the church in this period, it is necessary to remember the historical situation in Europe at that time. Constant wars made it impossible to create states in the proper sense of the word; there was still no strong secular power in general. By the end of the VI century. the remnants of Roman civilization disappeared, in which all wealthy members of society could read and write, secular educational institutions existed, and scholars appealed to all members of the community. The last thinker of this era was Boethius (6th century), whose work was greatly influenced by the teachings of Plato.

The next three centuries (until about the 10th century), historians often and rightly call the years of darkness, implying that the lack of stability, state power, constant raids, epidemics made the life of people, both kings and knights, and ordinary villagers and warriors, hard, full adversity and dangers. In fact, the only center of stability, culture, hope for a better future at that time was the church, it also united the disparate and warring tribes into a single whole. During this period, the confrontation between church and secular authorities, which was characteristic of the Middle Ages, arose.

Monasteries became a stronghold of science, they kept books and taught them to read and write.... In general, the only literate people, as a rule, were monks, and secular people, feudal lords, even the highest nobility, often did not know how to write and count. In the monasteries were kept not only church, but also secular books, including copies from the books of ancient psychologists. These works were studied and developed in the works of church scholars who usually worked at monasteries. It was also important that in this harsh time monasteries provided protection, protected from hunger and many diseases, from military robberies. Despite the opposition of the emperors, the power of the popes remained strong enough to resist any attempts to undermine the authority of the church. With the strengthening of states, the development of cities and crafts, the darkness began to dissipate, people had hope for a decent life in the present, and not only in the other world. However, this turn was not so favorable for the relationship between science and religion, since the clergy ceased to be the only stronghold of culture.

At this time, the first secular universities began to appear, first in Bologna and then in Paris. Secular schools were also opened, i.e. literate were already not only monks, but also the aristocracy, merchants and artisans. Strengthening cities with their self-government, which requires high skill and the implementation of shop rules, also required a new culture, a new self-awareness of man. A strong secular power appeared, which subjugated the ecclesiastical power.

It was at this time that scholasticism, which at that moment was a fairly progressive phenomenon, since it involved not only passive assimilation of the old, but also active explanation and modification of ready-made knowledge, developed the ability to think logically, bring a system of evidence and build your speech. The fact that this knowledge is already ready, i.e. scholasticism is associated with the use of reproductive rather than creative thinking, then it was a little alarming, since even reproductive thinking is aimed at obtaining and proving knowledge. However, over time, scholasticism began to slow down the development of new knowledge, acquired a dogmatic character and turned into a set of syllogisms that did not allow refuting the old, incorrect or incorrect positions in the new situation. Likewise, the church, which was in the VI-X centuries. in many respects the keeper of knowledge, became a brake on the development of science. In an effort to retain its priority positions, the church hindered the development of new concepts that contradicted its many dogmas, and over time these contradictions became more and more, and rejection increased. It was in the late Middle Ages that the Inquisition gained increasing importance, which tried to defend the previous positions of the church in power and science.

Somewhat later, in the XII-XIII centuries, a direction emerged in psychology, which received the name deism, which argued that there are two souls - spiritual (it is studied by theology) and bodily, which is studied by psychology. Thus, a subject for scientific study appeared.

By the XIV-XV centuries. the position of secular psychology, independent of theology, was strengthened, more and more scientists appeared who turned to psychological problems - R. Bacon, H. Vives, H. Huarte, W. Ockham. However, in secular psychology, it was not the questions of ethics, volitional behavior and personal freedom (which for a long time remained the problems of theology) that came to the fore, but the study of cognitive development, speech and abilities. So gradually psychology became the science of consciousness and of those processes of cognition of the environment, which are the predominant content of consciousness.

11. Thomas Aquinas and his doctrine of the soul

The expansion of the rights of science led to the fact that by the XIII century. theory of two truths, somewhat paraphrased in Thomism - a theory developed by the famous theologian Thomas Aquinas, - was already called upon to protect faith from scientific evidence. Trying to reconcile science and faith, Thomas Aquinas wrote that they really have two different truths, but if the truth of science contradicts the truth of faith, science must yield to it.

The works of Plato and Aristotle began to exert an increasing influence on the psychology of the Middle Ages, the concepts of which gradually acquired an increasingly orthodox character. Many prominent scientists of that time (Ibn Rushd, F. Aquinas) were followers of Aristotle, proving that it was their interpretation of this theory that was the only correct one.

During the Middle Ages, scholasticism (from the Greek "scholasticos" - school, scientist) reigned in the mental life of Europe. This special type of philosophizing ("school philosophy"), which prevailed from the 11th to the 16th century, was reduced to a rational, using logical devices, substantiation of the Christian doctrine.

There were various currents in scholasticism; the general attitude was to comment on texts. Positive study of the subject and discussion of real problems were replaced by verbal tricks. Appearing on the intellectual horizon of Europe, the legacy of Aristotle, the Catholic Church at first banned, but then began to "master", adapt according to its needs. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) coped with this task most subtly, whose teachings were later canonized in the papal encyclical (1879) as truly Catholic philosophy (and psychology) and received the name Thomism (somewhat modernized today under the name of neo-Thomism).

Thomism developed in opposition to the spontaneously materialistic interpretations of Aristotle, in the depths of which the concept of dual truth was born. At its origins was Ibn Roshd, who relied on Aristotle. His followers in European universities (Averroists) believed that the incompatibility with the official dogma of ideas about the eternity (not creation) of the world, about the destruction (not immortality) of the individual soul allows us to assert that each of the truths has its own area. True for one area may be false for another, and vice versa.

Thomas, on the other hand, defended one truth - the religious one, "descending from above." He believed that reason should serve her as earnestly as religious feeling. He and his supporters managed to crack down on the Averroists at the University of Paris. But in England, at Oxford University, the concept of dual truth prevailed, becoming the ideological prerequisite for the success of philosophy and the natural sciences.

Describing mental life, Thomas Aquinas put its various forms in the form of a kind of ladder - from lower to higher. In this hierarchy, each phenomenon has its place, the boundaries between all things are established, and it is unambiguously determined what should be where. Souls (vegetable, animal, human) are located in a stepped row, within each of them are abilities and their products (sensation, idea, concept).

The concept of introspection, which originated in Plotinus, became the most important source of religious self-deepening in Augustine and again acted as a pillar of modernized theological psychology in Thomas Aquinas. The latter presented the work of the soul in the form of the following scheme: first, it performs an act of cognition - it is the image of an object (sensation or concept); then realizes that she has performed this act; finally, having done both operations, the soul “returns” to itself, knowing no longer an image or an act, but itself as a unique entity. Before us is a closed consciousness, from which there is no exit either to the body or to the outside world.

Thomism, thus, turned the great ancient Greek philosopher into a pillar of theology, into "Aristotle with tonsure" (tonsure - a shaved place on the crown - a sign of belonging to the Catholic clergy).

12. Development of psychology in the Arab world

From VIII to XII century a large amount of psychological research was carried out in the East, where the main psychological and philosophical schools moved from Greece and Rome. The following fact was of great importance: Arab scientists insisted that the study of the psyche should be based not only on philosophical concepts about the soul, but also on the data of the natural sciences, primarily medicine.

At that time, in the Caliphate, which spread from Central Asia to Spain, not only religious and philosophical views differing from Islam were allowed, but also the conduct of natural science research, including the study of the functioning of the senses and the brain, was not prohibited.

Thus, the famous scholar of that time Ibn al-Haytham (965-1039) made a number of important discoveries in the field of psychophysiology of perception... His natural-scientific approach to the organs of perception (primarily to the visual system) was determined by the first attempt in the history of psychological thought to interpret their functions based on the laws of optics. It was important that these laws are accessible to experience and mathematical analysis. As the basis of visual perception, Ibn al-Haytham took the construction in the eye according to the laws of optics of the image of an external object. He argued that this process is determined by external, physical reasons, since later on, additional mental acts are added to direct optical effects, albeit unconsciously, due to which the perception of the form of surrounding objects, their size, volume, etc. arises.

Without limiting himself to general considerations about the dependence of phenomena on physical (optical) factors and laws, Ibn al-Haytham experimentally studied such important phenomena as binocular vision, color mixing and the observed effects, the phenomenon of contrast, etc. the perception of objects requires eye movement - the movement of the visual axes. Thanks to this, the body automatically performs operations that represent a kind of judgments about the location of perceived things, their remoteness from a person, their relationship to each other. In the event that the impact of objects was short-term, the eye manages to correctly perceive only objects already familiar to a person, which have left traces in the nervous system. If traces of past impressions have not yet accumulated, then the laws of optics are not enough to explain how impressions about the world around you arise. These laws should be combined with the laws by which the nervous system works.

The works of another outstanding Arab thinker, Ibn Sina (Latinized name - Avicenna, 980-1037), who was one of the most prominent doctors in the history of medicine, were also of great importance for psychology.

His teaching took shape in the era of the socio-economic heyday of the Caliphate, a huge empire from India to the Pyrenees, which was formed as a result of the Arab conquests. The culture of this state has absorbed the achievements of many peoples who inhabited it, as well as the Hellenes, Hindus, and Chinese.

Ibn Sina was an encyclopedist, his work was not limited to medicine and psychology, but he achieved the greatest achievements in these areas.

In his philosophical writings, Ibn Sina developed the so-called theory of two truths, which was of great importance for the development of not only psychology, but also other sciences in the medieval period. In psychology, this theory helped to deduce the subject of its study from the general subject of theology. Thus, psychology opened up a field of its own research, independent of religious postulates and scholastic syllogisms. In the theory of two truths, it was proved that there are two independent, like parallel lines, truths - faith and knowledge... Therefore, the truth of knowledge, without entering into contact and contradiction with religion, has the right to its own field of research and to its own methods of studying a person. Accordingly, there was two doctrines about the soul - religious-philosophical and natural science.

Studying the process of cognition, Ibn Sina emphasized that in every thing there is a universal that makes it related to other objects of a given class, as well as something different from others, a single thing that characterizes this particular thing. There are such different properties in all surrounding objects, including in a person, and they are the subject of research in various sciences. Based on this, the scientist proved that medicine and psychology have a special subject. Philosophy explores the existence, the multiple in each thing, while medicine and psychology study the concrete, the individual.

The generalized knowledge accumulated by centuries of experience in studying the behavior of living beings and their manifestations, with which practical medicine deals, was set forth in Ibn Sina's treatise "The Canon of Medicine". For several centuries this treatise was popular not only in the East, but also in the countries of Western Europe (starting from the 12th century, when it was translated into Latin). In Europe, this treatise eclipsed the works of the great doctors of antiquity, Hippocrates and Galen. This alone suggests that Ibn Sina did not confine himself to ideas about the functions of the body, which were accumulated by the previous science, but enriched his teaching with new information and generalizations. It should be borne in mind that then medicine was not understood as a highly specialized field of healing. It covered explanations that later began to be attributed to such disciplines as chemistry, botany, astronomy, geography, etc. And of course, all these disciplines contained empirical knowledge, skillfully generalized by Ibn Sina into the “psychological picture of man”.

Ibn Sina's position on the dependence of mental phenomena on physiological ones concerned the sensitivity of the organism, its ability to respond to external stimuli, as well as its emotional states. The cognition of the functions of the soul was aimed at cognition of the material, organic body, accessible to sensory observation, the effects of medicinal and surgical means, etc.

In all cases, Ibn Sina appealed to his medical experience. He was one of the first researchers in the field age psychophysiology, studied the relationship between the physical development of the body and its psychological characteristics at different age periods. At the same time, he attached great importance to upbringing: it is through upbringing, he taught, that the influence of the psyche on the body is carried out, so that it, being an active force, is capable of changing the physiological properties of this organism in a certain direction. A special place was given to feelings, affects that a child experiences at different age periods. Affects, on the other hand, usually arise when communicating with parents, when they affect the child. Accordingly, by evoking certain affects in a child, adults form his nature, his body, the entire system of his psychophysiological functions.

Preserved information that he in a number of cases acted as an excellent psychotherapist, in particular, he healed a young man who was dying of exhaustion due to unwillingness to eat. In the treatment, a technique was used, which in modern science is called associative experiment.

Ibn Sina is also credited with setting up an experiment that anticipated the study of a phenomenon called experimental neurosis... The two rams were given the same food. But one ate under normal conditions, while a wolf was tethered near the second. Fear influenced the feeding behavior of this ram. Although he ate, he quickly lost weight and died. The foregoing gives reason to see the beginnings of Ibn Sina experimental psychophysiology of emotional states.

Another famous Arab thinker - Ibn Rushd (Latinized name-Averroes, 1126-1198) lived in Spain, and then in Morocco, where he served as a judge and court doctor. His major works were the original commentary on the writings of Aristotle. This commentary acquired the meaning of an independent teaching, which had a great influence on Western European thought in the Middle Ages. We especially note the thought of Ibn Rushd that religion can be viewed as a belief that contains philosophical truth in an allegorical form .

Ibn Rushd argued that, following Aristotle, it is necessary to study the inextricable links between the functions of the body and those sensations, feelings, thoughts that a person experiences as processes inherent in his soul. As a doctor, Ibn Rushd carefully studied the structure of the human body and its senses, showing the dependence of the perception of the surrounding world on the properties of the nervous system.

Ibn Rushd's main conclusion was that along with the disintegration of the body, the individual soul of man is also destroyed. At the same time, the Arab thinker put forward an unusual idea that universal for all people the mind persists after the decay of the body and this testifies to the likeness of man.

Ibn Rushd emphasized that a person's capabilities in comprehending the truth are unlimited, and it is only important to teach people to think correctly, to instill in them the desire to reflect. The general ability to think, cognize the world and its laws, being innate, is inherent in every person. This separation of mind and soul was one of the most important provisions of Ibn Rushd's theory and has become the object of criticism from theologians. He also emphasized that the ability to think is potential. As the sun affects the eye, causing it to feel light, so does the universal mind, Ibn Rushd believed, acting on our potential abilities, evokes thoughts in us. For their actualization, awareness, certain conditions are necessary, in particular, cognitive motivation, external impressions, good teachers.

13. The development of psychology during the Renaissance

To some extent, the problems facing psychology during the Renaissance repeated the old ones that arose during the formation of scientific psychology at the turn of the 7th – 6th centuries. BC. As then, psychology sought to overcome the sacredness that returned to the Middle Ages. Therefore, we can say that the Renaissance period was essentially a time of return (revival) of the most important principles of ancient science, a departure from dogmatism and the search for ways of the most optimal scientific research of mental (mental) states. At the same time, a new subject of psychological science was born as a science of consciousness, which was finally formulated already in the New Time.

The 15th – 17th centuries remain in history as the rise of art, primarily of Italian painting and sculpture. The Reformation was also of great importance, changing not only church life, but also the consciousness of people. The discovery of America, the expansion of geographical concepts also could not but affect the general worldview and led to the active development of scientific knowledge. Significant discoveries were made primarily in astronomy (N. Copernicus, G. Galilei, D. Bruno), mathematics, physics (L. da Vinci, I. Kepler), philosophy and social sciences (T. More, M. Montaigne, E. . Rotterdam, N. Machiavelli).

The problems of the psyche were studied to a lesser extent at that moment, since the questions of spiritual life remained largely outside the circle of scientific study. A new aspect of the psychological and philosophical works of that time was the study of the problem of abilities, which, along with the study of knowledge, was leading at that time.

A new interpretation of emotions and the development of affects was given in his work by Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588). In an effort to explain the psychic from natural laws, he organized the first society of naturalists, which set itself the goal of studying nature in all its parts, explaining it from itself. Therefore, the doctrine of the driving forces, which are the source of energy for various forms of development, came to the fore in his concept. He singled out heat and cold, light and darkness, the ability to expand and contract, etc. as the main ones. These forces, Telesio argued, are in mutual penetration, creating new formations associated with the concentration of certain forces. The struggle of opposing forces is the source of all development. Telesio also believed that the main goal of nature is to preserve the achieved state. Thus, we can say that the idea first appeared in his concept homeostasis, although set out at the level of science of the time. The law of self-preservation, in his opinion, also obeys the development of the psyche, and reason and emotions regulate this process. At the same time, the strength of the soul is manifested in positive emotions, and in negative emotions, its weakness, which interferes with self-preservation. Reason evaluates situations from this point of view. Comparing these views of Telesio with the provisions of subsequent psychological concepts, proving the connection of emotions and reason with the desire for adaptation, one can see their relationship associated with the desire to explain the mental to its role in maintaining the vital functions of the organism. Telesio's concept at the time was a breakthrough towards new explanatory principles that make psychology an objective science.

The famous Spanish scientist Juan Luis (Ludovic) Vives (1492-1540) also wrote about the need to develop a natural-scientific approach to the study of the psyche. Vives was educated in England, worked for a long time in England, Holland and Germany, maintaining friendly relations with many European scientists of that time - T. More, E. Rotterdam and others. In his work "About soul and life" H. Vives substantiated a new approach to psychology as an empirical science based on the analysis of data from sensory experience. For the correct construction of concepts, he proposed a new way of generalizing sensory data - induction. Although the operational-logical methods of the inductive method were later developed in detail by Francis Bacon, H. Vives belongs to the proof of the possibility and validity of the logical transition from the particular to the general. The basis for such a transition, according to Vives, is the laws of association, the interpretation of which he took from Aristotle. The association of impressions determines, in his opinion, the nature of memory. On the same basis, the simplest concepts arise that provide material for all subsequent work of the intellect. Along with the sensory side of mental activity, great importance was attached to the emotional. Vives was one of the first to come to the conclusion that the most effective way to suppress a negative experience is not to contain or suppress it by the mind, but to repress it by another, stronger experience. The psychological concept of H. Vives served as the basis for the development of the pedagogical concept of J. Komensky.

No less important for psychology was the book of another famous Spanish psychologist - Juan Huarte (1530-1592) "Study of the ability to science." This was the first psychological work that posed as a special task the study of individual differences in abilities for the purpose of professional selection. In Huarte's book, which can be called the first study on differential psychology, four questions were posed as the main ones:

1. What qualities does the nature possess that makes a person capable of one science and incapable of another?

2. What kinds of gifts are there in the human race?

3. What arts and sciences are appropriate for each gift in particular?

4. On what grounds can one recognize the corresponding talent?

The analysis of abilities was compared with the mixture of four elements in the body (temperament) and with the difference in the spheres of activity (medicine, jurisprudence, martial arts, government, etc.) requiring the corresponding talents. The main abilities were recognized as imagination (fantasy), memory and intelligence. Each of them was explained by a certain temperament of the brain, i.e. the proportion in which the main juices are mixed in it. Analyzing various sciences and arts, H. Huarte evaluated them in terms of which of the three abilities they require. This directed Huarte's thought to a psychological analysis of the activities of a commander, doctor, lawyer, theologian, etc. The dependence of talent on nature does not mean, in his opinion, the uselessness of education and work. However, there are also large individual and age differences. Physiological factors, in particular, the nature of nutrition, play an essential role in the formation of abilities. Huarte believed that it is especially important to establish external signs by which one could distinguish the qualities of the brain that determine the nature of talent. And although his own observations about the correspondences between bodily characteristics and abilities are very naive (he, for example, singled out stiffness of hair, features of laughter, etc. as such signs), the very idea of ​​a correlation between internal and external was, as the subsequent path showed differential psychology, quite rational. Huarte dreamed of organizing professional selection on a national scale: “In order for no one to be mistaken in choosing the profession that best suits his natural talent, the sovereign should single out empowered people of great mind and knowledge who would open up more at a tender age; they would then make him necessarily study the area of ​​knowledge that suits him. "

Summing up the development of psychology in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it must be emphasized that this period was not homogeneous in its achievements and the content of psychological research. The relationship between church and science has changed several times over this long period of time, with the greatest persecution of knowledge and the system of scientific evidence taking place during the period of weakening of the power of the church, which, as a rule, viewed science not in itself, but as a source (or obstacle) for achieving certain goals.

During the Renaissance, psychological research returned to the issues that had been raised in antiquity. This is due to the emergence of the opportunity to fully read the works of scientists of that time (and not only the selected things of Plato or Aristotle), and with the revival of interest in studying the stages of cognition, human abilities, including the ability to build an objective picture of the world, to be aware of it as a whole. This interest became leading in the next period, called the New Time.

14. F. Bacon and the completion of the stage of development of psychology in the framework of the doctrine of the soul

Already at the end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th century. in psychological science, two main approaches in the theory of knowledge are formed, associated with the names of outstanding thinkers - F. Bacon and R. Descartes. The first of them became the founder of empiricism, which presupposes an orientation towards sensory knowledge, experience and experiment, while the second personified a rationalistic approach.

The English psychologist, philosopher and prominent politician Francis Bacon (1561-1626) belonged to a noble English family (his father was the keeper of the Great Seal of England for about 20 years). Bacon began his political career under Queen Elizabeth. For many years he was a member of parliament, as the Queen's lawyer he had to prosecute his patron, the Earl of Essex. On behalf of the Queen, he wrote a pamphlet to justify the trial. Subsequent biographers and researchers of Bacon's work most of all blamed him for this betrayal, committed by him in relation to his only friend and patron, considering it a more serious offense than the subsequent ones, for which he was convicted. It is not for nothing that the name of Francis Bacon is often cited in the history of science as an example of the discrepancy between talent and morality.

The flourishing of his social and political career is associated with the reign of James I, when Bacon became Lord Chancellor, Keeper of the Great Seal (1617), then Lord - Supreme Chancellor and Peer of England (1618). In 1621, Bacon was convicted of accepting gifts of the nature of bribery, deprived of all positions and convicted. After a quick release, refusing to return to government activities, he left for France and devoted himself entirely to science.

In 1597, Bacon published the first version of his "Experiments or Instruction of Moral and Political", which brought him literary fame. Subsequently, he repeatedly revised and republished this work, considering it the best fruit of his work. In his unfinished works, written during the period of his political and state activities, from 1603 to 1612, Bacon formulated the main ideas and provisions, which received their final form in the New Organon (1620) - the second part of the project of his life, “ The Great Restoration of Sciences ”, which remained unfinished. In these works, Bacon formulated the foundations of the direction, which received the name empiricism. Unlike sensationalism, with which it is directly related, in empiricism it is argued that true knowledge is based not only on sensory experience, but also on experiment, i.e. the data of our sense organs must be supplemented and verified by the results of the experiment, the readings of the instruments.

The scientist saw the task of science in the conquest of nature and the improvement of man. To achieve this, Bacon developed a program for restructuring the entire system of scientific knowledge, the main goal of which was to combat sacredness, dogmatism and scholasticism. Developing the classification of sciences, he proceeded from the position that religion and science form independent areas, their mixing threatens the danger of the emergence of a heretical religion or fantastic philosophy. Knowledge cannot be obtained ready-made, Bacon argued; it must be discovered, extracted, and obtained empirically. Therefore, in contrast to the dogmas and inferences rooted in science, divorced from reality, Bacon saw the basis of knowledge in direct sensory knowledge and experience. It is important to note that Bacon does not absolutize it: “Feeling itself is weak and deluded, and the tools designed to strengthen and sharpen the senses are not worth much. Most of all, the interpretation of nature is achieved through observations in appropriate, expediently set up experiments. Here feeling judges only experience, while experience - about nature and about the thing itself. " Thus, Bacon's empiricism is not just sensory perception, but experience based on experiment, this is what gives reason to consider the scientist the founder of empirical, experimental science.

A necessary prerequisite both for the construction of a new science and for objective knowledge is, according to Bacon, cleansing the mind of idols, or ghosts (by which Bacon understood the delusions of the human mind, shortcomings that distort correct knowledge or hinder it). The "Doctrine of Idols" was one of the most important parts of his methodology. He identified four types of idols: idols of the clan, caves, market and theater... The first two types of idols Bacon considers congenital, the second two types - acquired. In his works, the scientist gave a detailed description and characteristics of each species:

– idols of the clan- disadvantages associated with the peculiarities of the structure and functioning of the human sense organs (for example, the inability to see ultraviolet rays);

– cave idols reflect the subjectivity of cognition, since it is difficult for a person to recognize someone else's point of view;

– market idols associated with the use of words that are not always adequate to reality;

– theater idols- shortcomings that are the result of admiration for authorities, often false, and the desire to trust them more than your own thinking.

Bacon associated the possibility of building a new, objective science with the need to develop an objective method for obtaining knowledge and testing its truth. This method, in his opinion, should have been the proposed by him experimental inductive method... For sciences that receive data on the basis of sensory experience, experiment is the method of proof, for the theoretical sciences, new induction. New induction method developed by Bacon, was fundamentally different from the traditional induction adopted in the "old" logic. Bacon's induction assumed a gradual and continuous ascent from "sensations and particulars" to the general on the basis of observing and comparing the maximum possible number of facts, both positive and negative, which made it possible to avoid erroneous generalizations.

Its new method - inductive logic- Bacon understood as an instrument of knowledge, organon(that's why he called his main work "New Organon"). He compared its value to the possibility of using a ruler and compass to draw straight lines and perfect circles by people with different abilities. Bacon believed that by equipping people with this method (like a compass and a ruler), he gave them the same opportunities and practically equalized their talents, which would make science accessible to everyone.

Important for the formation of objective science was Bacon's idea of ​​the use of mathematics, which he considered a "great application" to the sciences and regarded as an "auxiliary" discipline.

The principles formulated by Francis Bacon became the general methodological principles of the construction of modern science, including psychology. Significant changes in psychology were associated with the fact that Bacon was the first to express the idea of ​​the possibility of a truly scientific study of the human psyche. As an adherent of the theory of "duality of truth", he recognized two truths - divine and scientific, philosophical... Bacon's deism manifested itself in his views on the "duality of the soul." During the time of Bacon, this position was progressive. According to his views, there is a divinely inspired soul (rational or rational) and a sensual soul (created). Bacon left the divinely inspired soul for the study of theology, theology, and the sensual soul has become the subject of research in philosophy and psychology... By this division, Bacon defended the scientific approach to the study of the human psyche. The sensual soul, according to Bacon, is common to animals and humans. But if in animals it is the main one, and its organ is the body, then in humans the sensual soul is the organ of the thinking soul. Bacon considered the subject of science to be the abilities of the soul, such as reason, imagination, memory, will, attraction, affects... It is interesting that he based his classification of sciences on the fundamental abilities of the human soul - memory, imagination, reason, considering history, poetry and philosophy as the main sciences. In addition to the abilities of the soul, psychology, according to Bacon, should study voluntary movements, irritability and sensations. In this way, Bacon developed a plan for psychological research, which found its embodiment in the works of his followers (Hobbes, Locke).

15. The teachings of R. Descartes - the transition from the study of the soul to consciousness

The first draft of a psychological theory, using the achievements of geometry and new mechanics, belonged to the French mathematician, naturalist and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). He came from an old French family and received an excellent education. He studied Greek and Latin languages, mathematics and philosophy at the Collegium De la Flèche, which was one of the best religious educational centers. At this time, he also became acquainted with the teachings of Augustine, whose idea of ​​introspection was later reworked by him: Descartes transformed the religious reflection of Augustine into purely secular reflection, aimed at the knowledge of objective truths.

After graduating from the college, Descartes studies law, then enters the military service. During his service in the army, he managed to visit many cities of Holland, Germany and other countries and establish personal contacts with prominent European scientists of that time. At the same time, he comes to the conclusion that the most favorable conditions for his scientific research are not in France, but in the Netherlands, where he moved in 1629. It is in this country that he creates his famous compositions.

In his research, Descartes focused on the model of the body as a mechanically working system. Thus, a living body, which in the entire previous history of knowledge was considered as animate, i.e. gifted and controlled by the soul, freed from its influence and interference. From now on, the difference between inorganic and organic bodies was explained according to the criterion of the latter being attributed to objects acting like simple technical devices. In an age when these devices were more and more definitely established in social production, scientific thought, far from production, explained the functions of the organism in their image and likeness.

For centuries, before Descartes, all activity on the perception and processing of mental "material" was considered to be produced by the soul, a special agent that draws its energy outside the material, earthly world. Descartes argued that the bodily structure, even without a soul, is able to successfully cope with this problem. Didn't the soul become "unemployed" in this case?

Descartes not only does not deprive it of its former royal role in the Universe, but raises it to the level of a substance (an entity that does not depend on anything else), equal to the great substance of nature. The soul is destined to have the most direct and reliable knowledge that a subject can only have about his own acts and states, which are not visible to anyone else; it is determined by a single sign - the direct awareness of its own manifestations, which, unlike natural phenomena, are devoid of extension.

This is a significant turn in the understanding of the soul, which opened a new chapter in the history of the construction of the subject of psychology. From now on, this subject becomes consciousness. .

Consciousness, according to Descartes, is the beginning of all principles in philosophy and science. Everything natural and supernatural should be doubted. Hence the famous Cartesian aphorism "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think - therefore I am"). Since thinking is the only attribute of the soul, it always thinks, always knows about its mental content, visible from within; the unconscious psyche does not exist.

Later, this "inner vision" began to be called introspection (seeing intrapsychic objects-images, mental actions, volitional acts, etc.), and the Cartesian concept of consciousness - introspective. However, like the concept of the soul, which underwent a most complex evolution, the concept of consciousness, as we will see, also changed its appearance. However, it had to appear first.

Studying the content of consciousness, Descartes comes to the conclusion about the existence of three types of ideas: ideas generated by the person himself, ideas acquired and ideas inborn. Human-generated ideas, are associated with his sensory experience, being a generalization of the data of our senses. These ideas give knowledge about individual objects or phenomena, but they cannot help in understanding the objective laws of the surrounding world. Can't help with this and acquired ideas, since they are also knowledge only about certain aspects of the surrounding reality. The acquired ideas are not based on the experience of one person, but are a generalization of the experience of different people, but only innate ideas give a person knowledge about the essence of the world around him, about the basic laws of its development. These general concepts open only to the mind and do not need additional information from the senses.

This approach to knowledge is called rationalism., and the way in which a person discovers the content of innate ideas, rational intuition... Descartes wrote: "By intuition I do not mean belief in the shaky evidence of the senses, but the concept of a clear and attentive mind, so simple and distinct that it leaves no doubt that we are thinking."

Recognizing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts (ideas) and "desires" are entities (substances) independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in an integral person. The solution he proposed was called psychophysical interaction. The body influences the soul, awakening "passive states" (passions) in it in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, possessing thinking and will, acts on the body, forcing this "machine" to work and change its course. Descartes was looking for an organ in the body with which these incompatible substances could still communicate. He suggested that such an organ be considered one of the endocrine glands - the pineal (pineal gland). Nobody took this empirical "discovery" seriously. However, the solution of the theoretical question of the interaction of soul and body in Cartesian formulation absorbed the energy of many minds.

The liberation of the living body from the soul was a turning point in the scientific search for the real causes of everything that happens in living systems, including the mental effects that arise in them (sensations, perceptions, emotions). At the same time, in Descartes, not only the body was freed from the soul, but the soul (psyche) in its highest manifestations became free from the body. The body can only move, the soul can only think. The principle of the body is a reflex. The principle of the soul's work is reflection (from Latin, "turning back"). In the first case, the brain reflects external shocks; in the second, consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas.

Throughout the history of psychology, there is a controversy of the soul and body. Descartes, like many of his predecessors (from the ancient animists, Pythagoras, Plato), opposed them. But he also created a new form of dualism. Both body and soul have acquired a content unknown to previous researchers.

16. Development of psychological knowledge by R. Descartes

Along with rational intuition, Descartes declared deduction(method of evidence from general to specific). At the same time, intuitive knowledge generated by the natural light of the mind, due to its simplicity, is more reliable than deduction itself. We can, for example, intuitively instantly grasp the mind that the triangle is limited to three lines, although the logical proof of this fact would take us a long period of time. It is important to remember that the most intimate truths should be derived not from ambiguous, but from the simplest and most accessible things. Thus, the main requirement for intuition is that knowledge must be clear and distinct and be comprehended simultaneously, and not sequentially.

The order of knowledge, according to Descartes, is to gradually reduce unclear, vague positions to simpler ones and then, proceeding from the intuitive understanding of the simplest, to ascend along the same steps to the knowledge of the rest.

Descartes' belief in the limitless possibilities of human cognition is associated with the belief in the objectivity of the methods of intuition and deduction proposed by him, with the help of which a person is able to reliably cognize himself, and the world around him, and abstract non-material concepts. In the event that the intellect examines a bodily thing, it needs the help of external senses to create an image of it. This is the role of such mental processes as sensation, memory, imagination. At the same time, true knowledge of the external world is impossible if intuition does not interfere with it; mistakes can arise due to the fact that a person is too immersed in his body and is not able to get rid of the delusions that it dictates to him through perception.

Descartes, introducing the concept of intuition, actually divided it into two parts, highlighting two types of intuition - experienced and ideal. This division is facilitated by his idea that although only one intellect is able to know the truth, but it resorts to the help of feelings, imagination and memory, so as not to leave without use any of the means at our disposal.

The study of passions was the subject of Descartes' last work, The Passion of the Soul, which was conceived of his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth, who was in exile in the Netherlands. In this work, Descartes came to the conclusion that there are two types of passions - active and passive.

In his theory, suffering states or passions are considered as a result of interaction with objects of the surrounding world and are identified with sensory cognition. These are sensations, perceptions, representations, feelings, ideas that do not come from the soul itself, but are brought in from the outside and are only realized by it in this form, i.e. these passions are imposed on the soul, it cannot change them. At the same time, constituting one of the sides of human interaction with the outside world, passions as a component of the cognitive assessment of the environment depend on the accuracy and truth of this assessment. Thus, as stated above, the foundations are laid cognitive approach to the problem of emotions.

Descartes identified active states with desires that come directly from our soul and depend only on it. Descartes sees the main purpose or function of passions in the fact that “they induce and adjust the soul of a person to desire what these passions prepare his body for; so, the feeling of fear causes the desire to run, and the feeling of courage - to fight ... "Passions" teach the soul to desire what is recognized by nature as useful and never change its desire ... "At the same time, active passions can force a person to perform actions dictated by reason and not associated with satisfaction biologically expedient desires. Thus, these passions are the source of both volitional and instinctive, self-preservation, behavior. They are also identified by a person with aspirations and affects, which depend not only on the soul, but also on the body and serve as a link between them. The only place where the soul connects to the body is the pineal gland (pituitary gland) in Descartes' concept. The influence of the soul on the course of the reflex lies in the fact that by its desire it makes the gland vibrate, directing the movement of animal spirits so as to cause the desired action (behavior) that corresponds to this desire. Thus, the soul changes the direction of the reflex, making the behavior volitional and purposeful. The theory of passions serves as a bridge for Descartes, connecting his doctrine of the soul and his doctrine of morality. Descartes considered ethics "the highest and most perfect science, which presupposes complete knowledge of other sciences and is the last step to the highest wisdom." Therefore, it can be considered natural to address ethical issues in his last work. Singling out six primary passions - surprise, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness, Descartes considered all other passions to be derived from them or their varieties.

He emphasized that the emergence and manifestation of passions does not depend on the direct volitional efforts and desires of a person. But the soul, no matter how weak it may be, is able to indirectly influence the passions. So, in order to suppress fear and show courage, it is not enough for a person to have only one desire. But the will can restrain those body movements that passion can cause (for example, prevent flight in case of fear). However, as Descartes wrote, "the strength of the soul without the knowledge of the truth is not enough." Therefore, in the intervals between attacks of fear, the will and reason take measures to understand the cause of the fear and make its new attack less dangerous. Instead of conquering one passion with another, which would be only imaginary freedom, but in reality would mean constant slavery, the soul must fight the passions with its own weapon, i.e. firm rules based on the correct understanding of good and evil. The will overcomes affects with clear and distinct knowledge, which shows what deceptive meaning things acquire during passionate excitement, revealing the real value of the surrounding objects. In his letters to Princess Elizabeth about a happy life and to Queen Christina about love and eternal good, Descartes constantly returned to the idea that the goal of human aspirations is peace of conscience, achieved only by the decision of the will to live virtuously, in harmony with oneself. Thus, wisdom consists in doing what is recognized as the best, virtue in firmness, and sin in impermanence.

Ethical views of Descartes are closely related to his theory of knowledge. Virtue is at the same time truth. If a person in his decisions and actions proceeds from the knowledge of truth, true judgments and firmly follows them, he can be sure that he will not have to repent or regret the consequences. Such a person gains mastery over his passions and lives by virtue. The central idea of ​​Descartes' ethics - domination over human passions - and the means of fighting passions recommended by him in many respects echo the moral teaching of the Stoics. However, Descartes, unlike the Stoics, did not consider passion as such an evil and only warned against their extremes and misapplication. An important difference in their positions was the fact that in Descartes' knowledge itself became a moral activity, and truth and goodness became identical concepts. One and the same single soul first cognizes the truth, freely avoiding rash judgments, in order to then act in accordance with it in moral behavior.

17. The concept of a reflex by R. Descartes

An important merit of Descartes was reflex opening... Recognizing the existence of two independent substances - the soul and the body, he came to the conclusion that the body does not need the soul as a source of activity. In his theory, the body is thought of as a machine that functions according to the laws of mechanics. The source of movement is not in the soul, but in the body itself, in its structure, the organization, which is "started", like any automatic machine, by an external push. Thus, according to Descartes, the soul is endowed with its own activity, directing the processes of thinking, cognition, and the main function of the body is movement, which is considered as a reflex. The term itself reflex in the works of Descartes is absent, but in his descriptions of the structure and functioning of the body, the main reflex arc components.

A significant influence on the creation by Descartes of his theory of the reflex was exerted by Harvey's discovery of the blood circulation process. Descartes thought of the passage of a nerve impulse by analogy with the passage of blood through the vessels. He believed that the entire body is permeated with nerves that originate in the brain and go to all parts of the body. He imagined the nerves in the form of thin threads surrounded by a sheath, like a tube. In addition to strings, these tubes contain "animal spirits" - the most mobile and lightest blood particles that are filtered from other particles in the brain (bodies "having no other property other than the fact that they are very small and move very quickly"). Through the pores in the brain, animal spirits can move to the nerves, and from them to the muscles, due to which the body is able to perform various movements. With an external influence on the nerve endings, the tension of the thread opens the valves, and the animal spirits move from one tube to another, heading to the corresponding muscle, inflate it, forcing it to shorten and contract. Thus, tracing the path that animal spirits travel along the nerves from receptors to the brain, and then to the muscles, Descartes actually gave a description of the reflex arc. So with the teachings of Descartes, a new kind of determinism was established in psychology - mechanistic determinism.

By the movement of animal spirits, Descartes explained all the variety of actions, human behavior. The movements of animal spirits inside the brain are perceived by the soul, in his opinion, as sensations, perceptions and representations. The change in the trajectory of movement of animal spirits (hence, the variability of behavior) Descartes explained by two reasons - habit, or exercise, and the influence of the soul.

Discussing the possibility of changing the course of the reflex, i.e. the possibility of learning and the formation of desired behavior, Descartes used the concept association, introduced by Aristotle. However, if Aristotle's associations are primarily associated with the work of the senses, Descartes extends associations to behavior, speaking of the connection between two actions or action and the image of an object. So. a shot that leads to a natural movement - to run away, to hide, can change its function during training, for example, for a soldier it becomes a signal to attack, and for a hunting dog - to search for game. This behavior change is not related to the influence of the soul and occurs because the associations that arise as a result of exercise or habit, deform the valves (pores) of the brain as a result of the tension of certain "threads". This leads to disruption of the natural movement of animal spirits, they move in a new direction and fall into another muscle, causing a correspondingly different movement. Descartes' ideas described were embodied in more detail in Gartley's associative theory. These changes in behavior occur, as has been said, without the intervention of the soul, while the influence of passions on activity is associated with the activity of the soul.

18. Philosophical views of B. Spinoza

Attempts to refute the dualism of Descartes were undertaken by a cohort of great thinkers of the 17th century. Their search was aimed at affirming the unity of the universe, putting an end to the gap between the bodily and spiritual, nature and consciousness. One of the first opponents of Descartes was the Dutch thinker Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677).

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam and received a theological education. His parents trained him as a rabbi, but already at school he developed a critical attitude towards the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible and the Talmud. After graduating from school, Spinoza turned to the study of exact sciences, medicine and philosophy. The writings of Descartes had a great influence on him. Criticism of religious postulates, as well as non-observance of many religious rites, led to a break with the Jewish community of Amsterdam: the council of rabbis applied an extreme measure to Spinoza - a curse and excommunication. After that, Spinoza taught for some time in a Latin school, and then settled in a village near Leiden, earning his livelihood by making optical glasses. During these years he wrote the "Principles of the Philosophy of Descartes" (1663), developed the main content of his main work "Ethics", which was published after his death, in 1677.

Spinoza taught that there is one, eternal substance - Nature- with an infinite number of attributes (inherent properties). Of these, only two are open to our limited mind - extension and thinking. Therefore, it makes no sense to imagine a person as a meeting place for bodily and spiritual substances, as Descartes did. Man is an integral bodily-spiritual being. The conviction that the body moves or rests at the will of the soul was formed due to ignorance of what it is capable of in itself, "by virtue of the laws of nature alone, considered exclusively as bodily."

The integrity of a person not only binds his spiritual and bodily essences, but is also the basis for cognition of the world around him, Spinoza argued. Like Descartes, he was convinced that it is intuitive knowledge that is leading, because intuition makes it possible to penetrate into the essence of things, to cognize not individual properties of objects or situations, but general concepts. Intuition opens up limitless possibilities for self-knowledge. However, knowing himself, a person cognizes the world around him, since the laws of the soul and body are the same. Proving the knowability of the world, Spinoza emphasized that the order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things, since both the idea and the thing are different sides of the same substance - Nature.

None of the thinkers realized with such acuteness as Spinoza that Descartes' dualism is rooted not so much in the focus on the priority of the soul (this has served as the basis for countless religious and philosophical doctrines for centuries), as in the view of the organism as a machine-like device. Thus, mechanical determinism, which soon determined the major successes of psychology, turned into a principle that limits the body's capabilities in a causal explanation of mental phenomena.

All subsequent concepts were absorbed by the revision of the Cartesian version of consciousness as a substance that is the cause of itself (causa sui), of the identity of the psyche and consciousness. From the searches of Spinoza it was clear that the version of the body (organism) should also be revised in order to give it a worthy role in human existence.

An attempt to construct a psychological doctrine of man as an integral being was captured in the main work of Spinoza "Ethics". In it, he set the task of explaining all the great variety of feelings (affects) as motivating forces of human behavior, moreover, explaining it in a "geometric way", that is, with the same inexorable precision and rigor with which geometry draws its conclusions about lines and surfaces. It is necessary, he wrote, not to laugh and cry (this is how people react to their experiences), but to understand. After all, the geometer in his reasoning is completely dispassionate; the same should be applied to human passions, explaining how they arise and disappear.

Thus, Spinoza's rationalism does not lead to a denial of emotions, but to an attempt to explain them. At the same time, he connects emotions with will, saying that absorption in passions does not give a person the opportunity to understand the reasons for his behavior, and therefore he is not free. At the same time, the rejection of emotions opens up the boundaries of his capabilities for a person, showing what depends on his will, and in what he is not free, depends on the prevailing circumstances. It is this understanding that is true freedom, since a person cannot free himself from the operation of the laws of nature. Opposing freedom to coercion, Spinoza gave his own definition of freedom as a cognized necessity, opening a new page in psychological studies of the limits of human volitional activity.

Spinoza singled out three main forces that rule people and from which you can derive all the variety of feelings: attraction(it is "nothing but the very essence of man"), joy and sadness... He argued that all emotional states are derived from these fundamental affects, and that joy increases the body's ability to act, while sadness decreases it.

This conclusion opposed the Cartesian idea of ​​dividing feelings into those rooted in the life of the organism and purely intellectual. As an example, Descartes in his last work - a letter to the Swedish queen Christine - explained the essence of love as a feeling that has two forms: bodily passion without love and intellectual love without passion. Only the first can be causally explained, since it depends on the organism and biological mechanics. The second can only be understood and described.

Thus, Descartes believed that science is powerless over the highest and most significant manifestations of the mental life of the individual. This Cartesian dichotomy (dividing in two) led in the 20th century to the concept of "two psychologies" - explanatory, appealing to the reasons associated with the functions of the organism, and descriptive, which believes that we explain the body, while we understand the soul. Therefore, in the dispute between Spinoza and Descartes, one should not see only a historical episode that has long lost its relevance.

19. D. Gartley as the creator of the first system of associative psychology.

Association (lat. Associatio - connection, interconnection) - in psychology and philosophy, a natural connection between individual events, facts, objects or phenomena reflected in consciousness and fixed in memory.

Associationism, or associative psychology, appeared as an independent direction in the XVIII century. This school laid the foundation for the separation of psychology into an independent science, independent of philosophy, with its own subject. In the mainstream of associationism, the orientation of psychology has also changed from philosophical to natural-scientific methodology, as well as the search for an objective method of research and the formation of experimental psychology began.

The term "associationism" was introduced by Locke, and the concept itself was used by Aristotle, who also developed the first laws of association. Then, already in modern times, this concept returned to psychology, however, the associations Descartes and Leibniz interpreted, in contrast to Aristotle, not so much as mechanisms for processing information, but as phenomena that interfere with the true understanding of things.

Some issues of associative psychology were developed in the works of Bonnet, Berkeley and Hume, but the emergence of associationism as a psychological school is associated with the name of D. Gartley, who built his psychological theory on the mechanism of associative processing.

Berkeley and Hume, developing the laws of association and connecting them with the characteristics of the human psyche, nevertheless considered these laws as a special case of their concept. D. Gartley (1705-1757) is rightfully considered the founder of associative psychology, which existed as the only psychological trend until the beginning of the 20th century. Having received first theological and then medical education, Gartley strove to create a theory that would not only explain the soul of a person, but also allow him to control his behavior. He chose associations as such a universal mechanism of mental life.

Gartley based his theory on Locke's idea of ​​the experimental nature of knowledge, as well as the principles of Newtonian mechanics. In general, an understanding of the human body, the principles of its work, including the work of the nervous system by analogy with the laws of mechanics discovered at that time, was a characteristic feature of the psychology of the 18th century. Gartley, who sought to explain human behavior on the basis of physical principles, did not avoid this mistake.

The doctrine of Gartley's association, which he outlined in his book "Reflections on a Man, His Structure, His Duty and Hopes" (1749), is based on the doctrine of vibration, since he believed that the vibration of the external ether causes a corresponding vibration of the sense organs, muscles and brain. Having analyzed the structure of the human psyche, Gartley singled out two circles in it - large and small. The great circle runs from the senses through the brain to the muscles, i.e. is actually a reflex arc that determines human behavior. Thus, Gartley, in fact, created his own, the second after Descartes in psychology, reflex theory, which explained human activity with the help of the laws of mechanics. According to Gartley, external influences, causing vibration of the senses, trigger a reflex. Vibration of the senses leads to vibration of the corresponding parts of the brain, and this vibration, in turn, causes the work of certain muscles, stimulating their contraction and body movement.

If the large circle regulates behavior, then the small circle of vibration, located in the white matter of the brain, is the basis of mental life, the processes of cognition and learning. Gartley believed that the vibration of the brain regions in the large circle causes a response vibration in the white matter of the brain. Disappearing in the large circle, this vibration leaves traces in the small circle. These traces, in his opinion, serve as the basis for human memory. They can be more or less strong, depending on the strength and significance of the phenomenon that left this mark. Of great importance was Gartley's idea that the degree of their awareness by a person depends on the strength of these traces, and weak traces, he emphasized, are not realized at all. Thus, he expanded the scope of mental life, including in it not only consciousness, but also unconscious processes, and created the first materialistic theory of the unconscious. Almost a hundred years later, Gartley's ideas about the power of traces and its connection with the possibility of their awareness were developed by the famous psychologist Herbart in his famous theory of the dynamics of representations.

Examining the psyche, Gartley came to the conclusion that it consists of several basic elements - sensations which are the vibration of the senses, views(vibration of traces in white matter in the absence of a real object) and feelings reflecting the strength of vibration. Speaking about the development of mental processes, he proceeded from the idea that they are based on various associations. In this case, the associations are secondary and reflect the real connection between the two centers of vibrations in the small circle. Thus, Gartley explained the formation of the most complex mental processes, including thinking and will. He believed that at the heart of thinking is the association of images of objects with a word (reducing thinking to the process of forming concepts), and at the basis of will is the association of words and movement.

Proceeding from the idea of ​​the formation of the psyche during his lifetime, Gartley believed that the possibilities of upbringing, of influencing the process of the child's mental development are truly limitless. His future is determined by the material for associations that others supply him, therefore it depends only on adults how the child will grow up, how he will think and act. Gartley was one of the first psychologists to talk about the need for teachers to use knowledge about the laws of mental life in their teaching methods. At the same time, he argued that a reflex, supported by a positive feeling, is more persistent, and a negative feeling that arises with a certain reflex helps to forget it. Therefore, the formation of socially accepted forms of behavior, the formation of an ideal moral person is possible, it is only necessary to reinforce the necessary reflexes in time or destroy harmful ones. Thus, the theory of the ideal person first appeared in the 18th century. and was associated primarily with a mechanistic understanding of his mental life.

Gartley's views had a huge impact on the development of psychology, suffice it to say that the theory of associationism existed for almost two centuries and, although it was repeatedly criticized, its basic postulates, laid down by Gartley, became the basis for the further development of psychology. No less important were his guesses about the reflex nature of behavior, and his views on the possibilities of education and the need to control this process are very consonant with the approaches of reflexologists and behaviorists, developed already in the 20th century.

In fact, since the emergence of associationism, i.e. Gartley's theory, we can already talk about the existence of an independent psychology, which is proved by the appearance of works devoted to purely psychological problems, and an analysis of its place in the system of sciences (for example, in the works of Kant) and the beginning of reading a course in psychology in educational institutions. Therefore, if experimental psychology is rightfully associated with the name of W. Wundt, then the emergence of psychology as an independent field of scientific research can be counted from the works of D. Hartley.

With the development of science, the appearance of new data in physics, biology, physiology, many of Gartley's provisions, especially those related to mechanics, began to rapidly become obsolete. This led to their revision, a new interpretation of the laws of associations. This is how the theory of associationism appeared in the classical works of D. Mill, T. Brown and other scientists of the first third of the 19th century.

3.2 The subject of the history of psychology and the logic of the development of science

The history of science is a special area of ​​knowledge. Its subject is essentially different from the subject of the science, the development of which it studies.

It should be borne in mind that the history of science can be talked about in two senses. History is a process actually taking place in time and space. He goes on as usual, regardless of what views of him are held by certain individuals. The same applies to the development of science. As an indispensable component of culture, it arises and changes regardless of what opinions about this development are expressed by various researchers in different eras and in different countries.

With regard to psychology, for centuries, ideas about the soul, consciousness, and behavior have been born and replaced each other. The history of psychology is intended to recreate a true picture of this change, to reveal what it depended on.

Psychology as a science studies the facts, mechanisms and patterns of mental life. The history of psychology describes and explains how these facts and laws were revealed (sometimes in a painful search for truth) to the human mind.

So, if the subject of psychology is one reality, namely the reality of sensations and perceptions, memory and will, emotions and character, then the subject of the history of psychology is another reality, namely, the activities of people engaged in cognition of the mental world.

This activity takes place in a system of three main coordinates: cognitive, social and personal. Therefore, we can say that scientific activity as an integral system is threefold.

The cognitive apparatus is expressed in the internal cognitive resources of science. Since science is the production of new knowledge, they changed and improved. These means form intellectual structures that can be called a mindset. The replacement of one system of thinking by another occurs naturally. Therefore, they talk about the organic growth of knowledge, about the fact that its history is subject to a certain logic. No other discipline, except for the history of psychology, studies this logic, this pattern.

So, in the 17th century, the idea of ​​the body as a kind of machine that works like a pump that pumps liquid was formed. Previously, it was believed that the actions of the body are controlled by the soul - an invisible disembodied force. The appeal to the incorporeal forces ruling the body was, in the scientific sense, futile.

This can be illustrated by the following comparison. When the locomotive was invented in the last century, a group of German peasants (as one philosopher recalls) explained its mechanism, the essence of its work. After listening carefully, they said: "And yet a horse is sitting in it." Once a horse is sitting in it, then everything is clear. The horse itself needs no explanation. The same was the case with those teachings that attributed human actions to the soul. If the soul controls thoughts and actions, then everything is clear. The soul itself does not need an explanation.

The progress of scientific knowledge consisted in the search and discovery of real reasons, available for verification by experience and logical analysis. Scientific knowledge is knowledge of the causes of phenomena, factors (determinants) that generate them, which applies to all sciences, including psychology. If we return to the aforementioned scientific revolution, when the body was freed from the influence of the soul and began to be explained in the image and likeness of a working machine, then this made a revolution in thinking. The result was the discoveries on which modern science is based. Thus, the French thinker R. Descartes discovered the mechanism of the reflex. It is no coincidence that our great compatriot I.P. Pavlov put a bust of Descartes near his laboratory.

The causal analysis of phenomena is usually called deterministic (from the Latin "determino" - I define). The determinism of Descartes and his followers was mechanical. The reaction of the pupil to light, the withdrawal of the hand from a hot object, and other reactions of the organism, which were previously dependent on the soul, were henceforth explained by the influence of an external impulse on the nervous system and its response. This same scheme explained the simplest feelings (depending on the state of the body), the simplest associations (connections between different impressions) and other functions of the body, attributed to the category of mental.

This way of thinking reigned until the middle of the 19th century. During this period, new revolutionary shifts took place in the development of scientific thought. The doctrine of the Gift of Wine radically changed the explanation of the life of the organism. It proved the dependence of all functions (including mental ones) on heredity, variability and adaptation (adaptation) to the external environment. It was biological determinism that replaced the mechanistic one.

According to Darwin, natural selection ruthlessly exterminates everything that does not contribute to the survival of the organism. From this it followed that the psyche could not have arisen and developed if it did not have real value in the struggle for existence. But its reality could be understood in different ways. It was possible to interpret the psyche as exhaustively explainable by the same reasons (determinants) that govern all other biological processes. But it can be assumed that it is not limited to these determinants. The progress of science has led to a second conclusion.

The study of the activity of the sense organs, the speed of mental processes, associations, feelings and muscle reactions, based on experiment and quantitative measurement, made it possible to discover a special mental causality. Then psychology arose as an independent science.

Major changes in the structure of thinking about mental phenomena have occurred under the influence of sociology (K. Marx, E. Durkheim). The study of the dependence of these phenomena on social life and social consciousness has significantly enriched psychology. In the middle of the 20th century, a style of thinking led to new ideas and discoveries, which can be conditionally called information-cybernetic (since it reflected the influence of the new scientific direction of cybernetics, with its concepts of information, self-regulation of system behavior, feedback, programming).

Therefore, there is a certain sequence in the change of styles of scientific thinking. Each style defines a picture of mental life typical for a given era. The laws of this change (transformation of some concepts, categories, intellectual structures into others) are studied by the history of science, and only by science alone. This is her first unique challenge.

The second task that the history of psychology is called upon to solve is to reveal the relationship of psychology with other sciences. Physicist Max Planck wrote that science is an internally unified whole; its division into separate branches is due not so much to the nature of things as to the limited ability of human cognition. In reality, there is an unbroken chain from physics and chemistry through biology and anthropology to the social sciences, a chain that cannot be broken in any place, unless arbitrarily.

Studying the history of psychology allows us to understand its role in the great family of sciences and the circumstances under the influence of which it changed. The fact is that not only psychology depended on the achievements of other sciences, but these latter - be it biology or sociology - changed depending on the information that was obtained through the study of various aspects of the mental world. Knowledge about this world is changing naturally. Of course, here we have a special regularity; it should not be confused with logic, which studies the rules and forms of any kind of mental work. We are talking about the logic of development, that is, about the transformations of scientific structures that have their own laws (such as, for example, the named style of thinking).

The influence of gender characteristics in the structure of the self-concept on the success of personal self-determination

A lot of research in Russian psychology has been devoted to the problem of self-awareness. These studies are concentrated mainly around two groups of questions. In the works of B.G. Ananyeva / 1 /, L.I. Bozovic / 3; 5 /, A.N. Leontyeva / 1 /, S.L. Rubinstein / 6 /, I.I.

Possibilities of the subject "Self-knowledge" in the spiritual and moral education of schoolchildren

The problem of self-knowledge in science has a long history. At the same time, it should be noted that, given the unification of society, research in this area is not so numerous. Only since the second half of the 20th century, philosophers, educators ...

Study of the characteristics of psychological development

Developmental psychology is a branch of psychological science that studies the facts and patterns of human development, the age dynamics of his psyche. The object of study of developmental psychology is a developing, normal, changing in ontogenesis ...

History of psychology

The subject of the history of psychology is the concept of the psyche (its nature, origin, functions, mechanisms) at different stages of the progressive development of science. Methods of the History of Psychology ...

The history of psychology as a science

The history of psychology has all the signs of science accepted today (although, as you know, there are a lot of options for constructing scientific systems). So, the object of the history of psychology is psychological knowledge ...

The history of psychology as a science

As the scientific signs of science in the history of psychology, one can single out general, special and particular laws. To the general laws inherent in the entire process of the development of psychological knowledge ...

Psychology as a science has a very short history. However, the first attempts to describe the mental life of a person and explain the reasons for human actions are rooted in the distant past. So, for example, even in ancient times, doctors understood ...

Features of the nature of the features

The nature of the people has a major role in the formulated behavior of people. Just try to induce a scientific typology, the character was robbed more than once in the course of the whole history of psychology ...

The term "psychology" itself was introduced by the German scholastics R. Goklenius and O. Kassmann in 1590 and was finally established after the publication in 1732 of the book "Rational Psychology" by H. Wolf. However, this event was preceded by a huge ...

Psychology subject: from antiquity to the present day

Periodization is of particular importance in reflecting the general line of development of psychology. Its main purpose is to highlight those fundamental changes and turning points in a single process of development of psychological science ...

Psychology as a Science

Psychology as a system of scientific knowledge

The subject of science is a conditionally limited area of ​​cognizable reality, which is distinguished by the special nature of the phenomena and patterns observed in it ...

The history of science is a special area of ​​knowledge. Its subject is essentially different from the subject of the science, the development of which it studies.

It should be borne in mind that the history of science can be talked about in two senses. History is a process actually taking place in time and space. He goes on as usual, regardless of what views of him are held by certain individuals. The same applies to the development of science. As an indispensable component of culture, it arises and changes regardless of what opinions about this development are expressed by various researchers in different eras and in different countries.

With regard to psychology, for centuries, ideas about the soul, consciousness, and behavior have been born and replaced each other. The history of psychology is intended to recreate a true picture of this change, to reveal what it depended on.

Psychology as a science studies the facts, mechanisms and patterns of mental life. The history of psychology describes and explains how these facts and laws were revealed (sometimes in a painful search for truth) to the human mind.

So, if the subject of psychology is one reality, namely the reality of sensations and perceptions, memory and will, emotions and character, then the subject of the history of psychology is another reality, namely, the activities of people engaged in cognition of the mental world.

This activity takes place in a system of three main coordinates: cognitive, social and personal. Therefore, we can say that scientific activity as an integral system is threefold.

The cognitive apparatus is expressed in the internal cognitive resources of science. Since science is the production of new knowledge, they changed and improved. These means form intellectual structures that can be called a mindset. The replacement of one system of thinking by another occurs naturally. Therefore, they talk about the organic growth of knowledge, about the fact that its history is subject to a certain logic. No other discipline, except for the history of psychology, studies this logic, this pattern.

So, in the 17th century, the idea of ​​the body as a kind of machine that works like a pump that pumps liquid was formed. Previously, it was believed that the actions of the body are controlled by the soul - an invisible disembodied force. The appeal to the incorporeal forces ruling the body was, in the scientific sense, futile.

This can be illustrated by the following comparison. When the locomotive was invented in the last century, a group of German peasants (as one philosopher recalls) explained its mechanism, the essence of its work. After listening carefully, they said: "And yet a horse is sitting in it." Once a horse is sitting in it, then everything is clear. The horse itself needs no explanation. The same was the case with those teachings that attributed human actions to the soul. If the soul controls thoughts and actions, then everything is clear. The soul itself does not need an explanation.

The progress of scientific knowledge consisted in the search and discovery of real reasons, available for verification by experience and logical analysis. Scientific knowledge is knowledge of the causes of phenomena, factors (determinants) that generate them, which applies to all sciences, including psychology. If we return to the aforementioned scientific revolution, when the body was freed from the influence of the soul and began to be explained in the image and likeness of a working machine, then this made a revolution in thinking. The result was the discoveries on which modern science is based. Thus, the French thinker R. Descartes discovered the mechanism of the reflex. It is no coincidence that our great compatriot I.P. Pavlov put a bust of Descartes near his laboratory.

The causal analysis of phenomena is usually called deterministic (from the Latin "determino" - I define). The determinism of Descartes and his followers was mechanical. The reaction of the pupil to light, the withdrawal of the hand from a hot object, and other reactions of the organism, which were previously dependent on the soul, were henceforth explained by the influence of an external impulse on the nervous system and its response. This same scheme explained the simplest feelings (depending on the state of the body), the simplest associations (connections between different impressions) and other functions of the body, attributed to the category of mental.

This way of thinking reigned until the middle of the 19th century. During this period, new revolutionary shifts took place in the development of scientific thought. The doctrine of the Gift of Wine radically changed the explanation of the life of the organism. It proved the dependence of all functions (including mental ones) on heredity, variability and adaptation (adaptation) to the external environment. It was biological determinism that replaced the mechanistic one.

According to Darwin, natural selection ruthlessly exterminates everything that does not contribute to the survival of the organism. From this it followed that the psyche could not have arisen and developed if it did not have real value in the struggle for existence. But its reality could be understood in different ways. It was possible to interpret the psyche as exhaustively explainable by the same reasons (determinants) that govern all other biological processes. But it can be assumed that it is not limited to these determinants. The progress of science has led to a second conclusion.

The study of the activity of the sense organs, the speed of mental processes, associations, feelings and muscle reactions, based on experiment and quantitative measurement, made it possible to discover a special mental causality. Then psychology arose as an independent science.

Major changes in the structure of thinking about mental phenomena have occurred under the influence of sociology (K. Marx, E. Durkheim). The study of the dependence of these phenomena on social life and social consciousness has significantly enriched psychology. In the middle of the 20th century, a style of thinking led to new ideas and discoveries, which can be conditionally called information-cybernetic (since it reflected the influence of the new scientific direction of cybernetics, with its concepts of information, self-regulation of system behavior, feedback, programming).

Therefore, there is a certain sequence in the change of styles of scientific thinking. Each style defines a picture of mental life typical for a given era. The laws of this change (transformation of some concepts, categories, intellectual structures into others) are studied by the history of science, and only by science alone. This is her first unique challenge.

The second task that the history of psychology is called upon to solve is to reveal the relationship of psychology with other sciences. Physicist Max Planck wrote that science is an internally unified whole; its division into separate branches is due not so much to the nature of things as to the limited ability of human cognition. In reality, there is an unbroken chain from physics and chemistry through biology and anthropology to the social sciences, a chain that cannot be broken in any place, unless arbitrarily.

Studying the history of psychology allows us to understand its role in the great family of sciences and the circumstances under the influence of which it changed. The fact is that not only psychology depended on the achievements of other sciences, but these latter - be it biology or sociology - changed depending on the information that was obtained through the study of various aspects of the mental world. Knowledge about this world is changing naturally. Of course, here we have a special regularity; it should not be confused with logic, which studies the rules and forms of any kind of mental work. We are talking about the logic of development, that is, about the transformations of scientific structures that have their own laws (such as, for example, the named style of thinking).

Hegel: The meaning and content of a concept are revealed only through the history of its origin and development, because he presented the entire natural, historical and spiritual world in the form of a process, i.e. in continuous movement, change, transformation and development and made an attempt to reveal the internal connection of this movement and development. The development of a concept is determined by logical contradictions. A concept is the logic of scientific problems. The concepts of science are formed, destroyed, reconstructed and built on top of each other over the course of long millennia. The end product of these processes - the subject of science - turns out to be a multi-layered and complex formation. Davydov V.V. used in his writings the concept of monism, and applied it to define the concepts and subjects of psychology, including. If Hegel considered the concept only through its history, that is, through an integral process, then Davydov believed that the system of psychological knowledge should grow from one single cellular concept, he considered activity to be such. Mythology, philosophy, theology at all times brought to the fore the problem of a single, "undeveloped beginning of a developed whole", the view on which determined the general vision of the problem of the multiple. Hegel introduced a strong concept - "the new universal", into which, under certain conditions, some special one can turn, thereby breaking the closed cycle of development. This means that development is not just a process of generating a concrete variety of phenomena from an abstract universal "cell". Theoretical analysis is designed to recreate the most essential and intimate: the genesis of the most universal in a concrete material, because it is not given, but only given in it. And this creates an additional difficulty: after all, as EV Ilyenkov wrote in his book "Dialectical Logic" (M., 1974) - one of VV Davydov's handbooks - any universal at first appears as a kind of "anomaly", "deviation from the rule "before it personally reveals its natural character. He said this about activity, but this point of view applies to all other concepts. As Davydov believed: meaningful generalization, a theoretical concept is primarily imagination. According to Ilyenkov, it is not so easy to form a concept, first it is necessary to single out the particular features possessed by those objects for which we want to form a concept, and then select a common feature for them that will be present only for them, and on the basis of this form concept.

In the development of psychology, the concepts themselves changed and restructured and this is due not only to the fact that the views of the scientists themselves on the problem under study changed, but the problem itself changed, in the process of development the psyche changed. So the concept of the psyche in the history of psychology can be interpreted in two ways from the point of view of the subject and instrumental approaches. The subject approach is characterized by the attitude to the psyche as an object, the psyche is a substance. An instrumental psyche is a means or a way of salvation.

1. 
   The logic of the functioning of psychology in the general process of human culture.
2. 
   The reasons for the formation of psychological concepts in the history of psychology.

Psychological concepts are born as a response to tensions and crises that arise in the perception of the world. The initial problems that determined the development of psychological thinking seem simple enough. Obviously, the first poke to cognition is a feeling of insecurity. For psychological cognition - first of all, lack of confidence in oneself and one's actions in relation to the people around. With full confidence in the correctness of their actions and their perception of the world, there is no motivation to learn and analyze anything else. Uncertainty breeds doubt, and doubt is a clash in one head of different opinions about the world and about oneself.

The theoretical explanation of the psyche from the very beginning was prompted not simply by the fact of the existence of the psyche and its perception, but by certain tensions of thought. These tensions arose at the first unsuccessful attempts of thinkers to construct any image of the psyche. Usually, perceiving scientific concepts, we do not think too much about the fact that at the beginning of the process of understanding there are always nodes of misunderstanding of phenomena that determine this process.

Determining the nature of mental images, P.Ya. Galperin wrote that the image is a hidden "reserve field" for testing and orienting one's actions. This "spare field" arises only in those situations where there are no ready-made possibilities for satisfying needs, where there is variability and mobility of the surrounding situations. In these situations, it is impossible to apply once and for all ready-made actions, each action requires restructuring and individual organization in accordance with the new situation. Adapting actions to changing situations is for the most part risky and cannot be based on real testing of these actions in a real situation. That is why the process of testing and building actions on the basis of a copy of a situation or a reflected situation is deployed, i.e. based on her mental image.

The construction of any mental images is awakened, therefore, by the instability of the surrounding situations, the disappearance of familiar conditions, for adaptation to which it was enough to have automated and typed actions. The mental image of the world becomes a substitute for this world, more reliable for testing and constructing actions than the changing world itself. This functional characteristic of mental images allows us to understand not only the cause of their appearance, but also the dependence of the content of images on those for the solution of which these images arise. The subject (human or animal) does not need to always and completely reflect the whole world, all objects or influences of surrounding situations. All this must be done only to the extent that the stability of these situations is violated and the mismatch of these situations with the usual methods of action.

All that has been said is related to the construction of theoretical images and concepts of psychology, including the image of the psyche itself. If we try to understand the emergence of such complex forms of consciousness as philosophy, science, religion and art, then here too we can see that new images of the world are unfolding in them, which were not previously used by people in organizing their lives. And although here we are talking not about individual, but about collective, social images of the world, the mechanism of their emergence is basically the same. With the emergence of such systems of images as philosophy or science, one should also assume a violation of stable social situations and the order of life to which the activities of people have been adapted for thousands of years.

In the twentieth century, psychologists have already done a lot to solve both the problem of determining fate and the problem of the nature of the soul. These problems are solved in different schools with the help of different concepts. In Hegelian and Marxist psychology and philosophy, the concept of activity has become a synonym for the concept of "determinant of fate". Activity in a philosophical and psychological interpretation is not the current hustle and bustle of the day and not a set of actions, like this

usually appears to everyday consciousness, but something much more significant, comparable to the idea of ​​fate, and in a sense even to the idea of ​​God. After Hegel and Marx, philosophy and psychology began to see in “activity” a super-personal process of the formation of a person, his character, mental abilities, etc.

The preconditions for such an idea of ​​an external, invisible force that organizes the fate and actions of a person can be found in the ancient philosophers. These ideas, necessary for the creation of theoretical psychology, developed in philosophy, claiming to build a holistic picture of the world, for example, in the teachings of B. Spinoza and G.V.F. Hegel, who represented the human psyche as a natural component of a single world spiritual-cosmic process.

But scientific psychology did not accept and did not implement any of these concepts, although Soviet psychology sometimes made efforts to break through to a unified theory of development, to build the concept of a unified psychosocial space. But, having received an installation to separate mental and social processes from biospheric and cosmic ones, Marxist psychology could no longer restore the lost connection of the human soul with the Universe that gave birth to it. And in Western European and American psychology, the situation is even worse. In scientifically oriented psychology of the 18th - 20th centuries, instead of including a person in the single Logos of the Universe, they began to split him into separate mental elements.
4. Spiritual and material integrity of nature in the concept of Brahmanism.

Indian philosophy is based on the sum of the most ancient texts and their traditional interpretations - Vedanta. Each of the Vedas includes several levels. The first of these are mantras and brahmanas. Mantras are hymns, formulas and incantations. Brahmanas are later texts containing ritual prescriptions and explanations of some of the mythological plots presented in the mantras. The next levels are aranyakas and upanishads, where a more detailed interpretation of the provisions of the Vedanta is given.

The main logic of this philosophy is expressed not in texts, but in the organization of a person's life path. The logic and essence of ideas is comprehended by their practical assimilation, by real living action. It is a culture of fixed rules of life and structured relationships between groups of people. Main the content of oriental culture, its meanings and concepts are recorded and transmitted in organized action, in daily activities, in direct communication with the bearers of the culture.

4 levels of organization of Vedic texts correspond to 4 stages of the life path of brahmanas - representatives of the highest class groups of Indian society. 1st stage: training, during the cat. a young brahmana memorizes the Vedic mantras. 2nd stage: he marries and becomes a householder; organizes the life of the family, obeying the ritual precepts of the brahmana (texts). 3rd stage: begins after the children grow up and the first grandchildren are born; the brahmana goes to the forest and studies the aranyaka. 4th stage: the former vanaprastha (living in the forest) becomes a lonely wandering ascetic, comprehending the meaning of the Upanishads at this time. Vedic texts accompany a brahmana throughout his life, engaging in rituals and ensuring first the inclusion of the man in this life, and then his gradual departure from it.

It is in the logic of the inclusion of a person in life and the organized departure from it that the ideas of the ancient Hindus about the soul unfold. These views are distinguished by the deep fusion of the man and his life with the general cycles of natural phenomena. Success, health, family or wealth all depend on the participation of numerous gods.

The main principle of the early Vedic worldview was the deification of nature as a whole, equally uniting the forces of space and earth, gods and people. The pantheon of Indian gods is complex and fundamentally undifferentiated. The number of gods included in it is indefinite.

In Vedic ideas, there is no clear boundary between gods and man. The images of the gods themselves are poorly individualized and blurred so that sometimes it is impossible to determine whether we are talking about the same god, or about something derived from him, or about a group of similar gods. Thanks to this, an idea of ​​the continuum of living things is formed, covering both terrestrial living beings and the cosmos full of gods. Gods are functionally oriented forces.

The law reigns over the whole world, over all gods, only within the framework of the cat. everyone can do their own thing. This is rita - the great principle of order, overcoming chaos and disorder. The gods act as the guardians of the rita. The impersonal cosmic principle of rita dominates the entire world. The main goal of people is also seen in supporting rita.

In the Aranyaks and Upanishads, two concepts are presented that are most important for understanding the soul in Brahmanism: brahman is the support of the universe, a sacred force that extends to the whole world, the omnipotence of the world and its fundamental principle; a brahmana appears before the gods and demonstrates to them their powerlessness and insignificance before his power. Atman is the essence of a living org-ma; this is the body of the bang in its integrity and vitality, everything that generates and supports it. The Upanishads repeatedly confirm the unity and identity of Atman and Brahman.
5. The crisis of the 6th century. BC. in ancient Indian philosophy. Bhagavad-gita.

As the socio-psychological tension in Indian society grows, contradictions in philosophy and religion are growing. New schools are being formed, where the problems of psychology are aggravated and solved in a different way than in classical Vedanta. The crisis of Brahmanism in the 7th - 5th centuries expressed in the development of various heresies and new religious and philosophical trends. In opposition to Brahmanism, several schools are simultaneously formed, the most famous of which are the Ajaviks, Buddhism and Jainism. At the same time, on the basis of the Brahmanism of the era of the Vedas and Upanishads, a new religion of India, Hinduism, was formed.

In the VII-VI centuries. BC. in India, differences in the interpretation of classical texts grew, preachers appeared, setting out views different from Brahmanism. At the same time, the personality cult of the creators and preachers of religions was formed. Vedanta and Brahmanism, which did not make a cult out of the creators of their ideas, are being replaced by religions that raise their prophets to the level of gods. At the same time, these new religions focus much more deeply on the problems of the individual.

Period VI-V centuries. BC. was unique in the brightness and grandeur of the philosophical and religious trends that emerged around the world at that time. Classical philosophical and religious schools were formed during the transition from the 6th to the 5th century BC. The destabilization of the old mythological and religious consciousness, which gave rise to new concepts of the world, is taking place simultaneously in different countries along the entire wide front of Eurasia. Almost at the same historical time in India, China, Greece, Persia, new philosophical ideas are formed, the significance of the cat. proven by the following millennia.

Bhgavad-gita is one of the greatest philosophically significant poems of ancient India. In her, the god Bhagavat appears in the human form of the king's chariot Krishna. Krishna, first on behalf of the god Vishnu, and then on behalf of the god Bhagavata, explains to King Arjuna a number of philosophical and religious provisions of the ancient Indian religion.

In the Bhagavad-gita, only the great and impersonal Absolute, Brahman, is real. The soul is real and is a manifestation of the great Atman. Atman is the energy of the spirit, the great impersonal ruler of the universe, connecting the bang with Brahman. Birth, fate and new incarnations in a bunch are determined by the law of karma, as in brahmanism. However, in the Bhagava-gita, the kshatriyas are the carriers of the highest knowledge. The goal of the soul is to merge with the great Absolute, to dissolve the soul in the world spirit.

Krishna denies the possibility of destroying the soul, and, consequently, the reality of killing a bang. The Atman cannot be annihilated, and the human soul either merges with Brahman, or is reborn in a different form. Where there is no real death, there is no real responsibility for it.

The passionate fulfillment of one's religious duty does not free the soul of the bang, but, on the contrary, binds it to the earthly world. An uninterested act does not generate negative karmic consequences.

In the Bhagavad-gita, the concept of the personality of God and the presence of divine power in people unfolds. Harr Bhagavat's relationship with the followers of his ideas takes on human features. Bhagavat appears in the poem as Brahman and the supreme Atman.

The idea of ​​sin as a delusion in faith arises. Belief in the position of the old Vedas is now such a delusion. The Vedas do not lead to the wisdom of liberation, but only bind the bang to worldly life.

One can compare the relationship between Bhagavad-gita and Vedanta with that of the New and Old Testament in Christianity. A visual image of God appears. The dogmas of the old religion are partly recognized and partly denied. The personality and humanity of God grows. The vectoriality of religion is increasing, taking the soul of a bang away from the material world.
6. Jainism and Buddhism as new ideas about the soul in the ancient Indian philosophy of the 6th century. BC.

Jainism developed parallel to Vedanta, appearing and disappearing for a while as a religious trend. A stable branch of Jainism was formed only in the 5th century. BC. and originates from the deeds of the last 24th tirthankara - Mahavira. Jainism has shown itself as an opposition to Brahmanism, reinforced by the amazing way of life of ascetic preachers. The Jains hardly wore any clothes, patiently endured the heat, the cat. reached in India at times an extremely dangerous degree.

The followers of Jayanism were divided into monks and laymen. For the laity, only a few requirements were obligatory (abstinence, honesty, etc.). The monks indulged in cruel fasts, mortifying their flesh. They did not have to live in one place and wandered around the country, wore either very simple clothes, or did without it at all. The hair on the head was pulled out by the roots. The greatest sin was harming animals.

The Jains denied the idea of ​​a personal god, argued with those who believed in a creator god or the creator of the world, capable of somehow influencing the world. The world is ruled by the impersonal law of karma. Jains recognized only deities subject to the law of karma and, in fact, equal in this to people.

Unlike Buddhists, the Jains claimed the real existence of a soul, immaterial and opposed to the material world. The soul is qualitatively different from the material world, in its usual state it is subject to the bonds of matter and the law of karma, which realizes itself through a special "karmic matter". Karma severely manifests itself in rebirth and transmigration of souls. But the soul seeks to break this dependence and free itself from the law of karma. The ideal of aspirations of the person is. moksha - the liberation of the soul from the chain of karmic rebirths.

The desire of the individual soul to break free from the rigid logic of its determination is the formation of the subjectivity of the bang.

Jains divided the world into living - jiva (soul) and inanimate - ajiva (non-soul). Inanimate is matter composed of atoms; matter is tangible, tastes, smells, sounds / colors. All living things are identified with the animate. The earth is also alive and animate. But there is a different level of animation. Earth, water, air, fire and plants have only the sense of touch. And people, animals and birds have all five kinds of senses. Jiva (soul) is eternal, but it breaks up into many souls, clothed in material sheaths. These materialized private souls pass from one body to another. This endless circle of movement is called samsara. But, in fact, in all living things there is one single soul. And the separation, the final liberation of the soul from the body, overcoming samsara - this is Moksha - DOS. purpose.

All jivas, with the exception of those who have already freed themselves from karma, have a certain amount of energy, which enables them to release energy and create witchcraft bodies. Jivas can manifest themselves in 3 types of bodies: food, karmic and fiery. The liberated jivas - siddhis - live at the highest point of the universe, in the heavenly abode of Siddhakshetra.

Buddhism became another form of anti-Brahmanical religious movement in India. He expressed in his concepts the opposition of the individual and the state to the former tribal systems of India. Buddhism emerged in the second half of the 6th century. BC. Its creator is Siddharta. An essential factor in the development of Buddhism was the process of increasing the subjectivity of the individual.

Buddhism did not put the brahmanas first, but the kshatriyas. Like Jainism, Buddhism does not recognize the authority of the Vedas, but like Brahmanism, Buddhism recognizes the law of rebirth and karma.

Buddhism denied the reality of the soul. Any life is suffering, in the chain of birth there cannot be a happy life. Buddhism considers the individual existence of a person to be illusory. The Buddha adopted from Brahmanism the concept of the gradual accumulation of spiritual merit, passing through a series of progressive states - lives. Not the whole substance of the soul passed through the chain of births, but only a set of separate states, cat. was samsara.

The purpose of being in Buddhism is nirvana - liberation from one's own I, overcoming worldly connections and dependencies.

The danger of recognizing the absolute determinism of events and fatalism, proclaimed by some currents competing with Buddhism, prompted the Buddha not only to avoid speculations about the soul or the nature of the world, but generally to tend to deny their reality. Buddhism's denial of the reality of being: there is only becoming, hence, the soul is just a stream of consciousness, constant becoming and change at every single moment. The idea of ​​the soul as a stable reality, as a substance is a dangerous illusion that binds the person to the world of suffering, to samsara.

Buddhism denies the unity of the person, and therefore denies the person himself. The individual I bang is just one of the moments of the perception of life.

Introduces the concept of anatman (non-soul). There is nothing lasting and permanent: no matter, no god, no soul.

Buddhism reduces the individual self to a stream of impressions. Personality is a constantly changing state of changing elements - dharmas. Dharmas are peculiar bursts of psychic energy, eternal elements of the life process. That which in other concepts was called the soul, Buddhism was called. santana - flow or sequence.

Death is the inevitable cessation of santana, when the former bonds created by the power of the prapti are broken and the stream disintegrates into elements. With the recognition of the mortality of the soul, samsara also ceases to be a true reality and is a combination of mental states. The new combination of states of the soul in the new birth is determined by the previous combination of states - according to the law of moral responsibility. Actions performed by a person in one life transfer energy to another life. Death ends the individual state, but the deeds of the person affect new existences. This is what ensures the law of karma, when each new existence is the result of previous streams of events.
7. The concept of the soul in ancient Greek philosophy.

The initial motive of psychological cognition was the lack of confidence in the guarantee of happiness, the desire to learn to live happily. The inconsistency of the usual concepts forced to analyze the logic and nature of thinking, the nature of the soul.

Ideas about the soul of a bang, expressed in poems Homer, can be divided into 3 types: the soul itself is a psyche (a psyche is a semblance of a body devoid of density, its special double and an image); tyumos - what in modern psychology can be attributed to the emotional-volitional part of the psyche; noos is the mind of the bang and the gods. Psyche and thumos are inherent not only in people and gods, but also in animals. Only gods and people have the mind.

The explanation of the nature of the psyche through its correlation with the gods or with the world of spirits was logically built in the form of a doubling of the invisible. People used to explain the nature of the psyche those images of the invisible, the cat. themselves before that arose from the observation of facts, were built by analogy with the soul as an invisible engine and organizer of the visible movement of the body. To explain the nature of the psyche isp. already understandable and familiar images of gods or spirits, cat. were created by analogy with the psyche as images of the organizers of the movement of the world invisible to the eye.

The idea of ​​the unity and inseparability of the soul and the external world developed in the 6th century. BC. by the Greek philosophers of the Miletus school. Thales I saw the fiery principle in the basis of both the soul and nature. He considered all matter to be animate.

Heraclitus developed the idea of ​​the unity of the nature of the soul and the physical world. He saw the beginning of all that exists in fire. Fire is the genetic substance of the world. The fire of the world is eternal and divine. Space is not eternal. The cosmos burns and burns up in the world fire. The world conflagration will also become the great world judgment. Fire is a living and intelligent force, the original spirit. Fire is endowed with a logo, a cat. represents the law of motion of the universe. That which for the senses the man appears as fire is revealed to the mind as logos.

The material analogue of the soul is yavl. steam. The world emerged from fire. Fire and logos are also inherent in the human soul. The soul evaporated from moisture, and moisture came from the unified nature of the Earth.

The bang's soul has two planes: dry fiery and wet. In the material-material plane, the soul is one of the manifestations of fire. The soul combines wet and fiery principles. Souls are born evaporating from moisture under the influence of fire. In its transformation from moisture to fieryness, the soul is filled with energy, like hot and dry steam, but if it becomes damp and heavy, it returns to a moist state and dies. The soul, when it dies, turns back into water.

The dry fiery component of the soul is its logos. This is the psychic or intelligent plan of the soul. The more fire in the soul, the better. Being fiery, the soul has a logos, a cat. increases in its development. The logos of the soul is as unlimited as the logos that rules the cosmos. A dry soul is the wisest and best. A wet soul is a bad soul. Such a soul is found in drunkards, in sick people, or in people who indulge in pleasures. For the soul, any pleasure is dangerous because it makes it moist, and thereby brings it closer to death.

The concept of the soul developed in 2 mystical schools of Greece: the school of the Orphic and the school of the Pythagoreans.

"The subject of the history of psychology, its development and principles of science"

1. Subject and methods of history of psychology

The history of psychology studies the patterns of formation and development of views on the psyche based on the analysis of various approaches to understanding its nature, functions and genesis. As you know, psychology is connected by extremely diverse ties with various fields of science and culture. From its very inception, it was focused on philosophy and for several centuries, in fact, was one of the branches of this science. The connection with philosophy was not interrupted throughout the entire period of existence of psychology as a science, sometimes weakening (as in the early 19th century), then again strengthening (as in the middle of the 20th century).

The development of natural science and medicine has had and continues to exert no less influence on psychology. At the same time, in the works of many psychologists, there is a clear connection with ethnography, sociology, cultural theory, art history, mathematics, logic, linguistics. Therefore, in the history of psychology, its connections with other sciences are analyzed, their influence on each other, which changed in the process of development of psychological science, although the priority importance of philosophy and natural science remained unchanged.

Naturally, the views on the subject of psychology, on the methods of studying the psyche, and its content also changed. The analysis of these changes is also the subject of research in the history of psychology.

The methods used in historical psychological research, of course, differ from the methods of general psychology. Practically none of the basic methods of psychological science can be used in the history of psychology - neither observation, nor testing, nor experiment. The field of application of these methods is limited only by a narrow circle of modern (for the historian of psychology) scientists and by the present state of the problems relevant for this time, while the age of psychological science is measured in centuries.

Therefore, scientists studying the history of psychology develop their own research methods or borrow them from related disciplines - science of science, history, sociology. These methods are adequate to the task of not only recreating the history of the development of a separate psychological direction, but also including it in the general context of psychological science, historical situation and culture. So, in the history of psychology, the historical-genetic method is used, according to which the study of the ideas of the past is impossible without taking into account the general logic of the development of science in a certain historical period, and the historical-functional method, thanks to which the continuity of the ideas expressed is analyzed. Of great importance are the biographical method, which makes it possible to identify the possible causes and conditions for the formation of the scientist's scientific views, as well as the method of systematizing psychological statements.

In recent decades, the methods of categorical analysis, introduced by the famous historian of science M. Blok, have been increasingly used. In our country, this approach was developed within the framework of the historical psychology of science by M.G. Yaroshevsky. It involves taking into account the socio-historical conditions that determined the emergence and development of this scientific school, as well as the study of ideogenesis, cognitive style, the opponent's circle, social perception and other determinants that led to the emergence of ideas that are significant for psychology.

The sources for the history of psychology are primarily the works of scientists, archival materials, memories of their lives and activities, as well as the analysis of historical and sociological materials and even fiction that helps to recreate the spirit of a certain time.

2. Stages of development of psychology

Psychology has gone through several stages in its development. The pre-scientific period ends approximately in the 7th-6th centuries. BC e., that is, before the beginning of objective, scientific research of the psyche, its content and functions. During this period, ideas about the soul were based on numerous myths and legends, on fairy tales and initial religious beliefs connecting the soul with certain living beings (totems).

The second, scientific period begins at the turn of the 7th-6th centuries. BC e. Psychology during this period developed within the framework of philosophy, and therefore it received the conditional name of the philosophical period.

Also, its duration is somewhat conditionally established - until the appearance of the first psychological school (associationism) and the definition of psychological terminology itself, which differs from that adopted in philosophy or natural science.

In connection with the conventionality of the periodization of the development of psychology, which is natural for almost any historical research, some discrepancies arise when establishing the time boundaries of individual stages. Sometimes the emergence of an independent psychological science is associated with the school of W. Wundt, i.e. with the beginning of the development of experimental psychology. However, psychological science was defined as independent much earlier, with the awareness of the independence of its subject, the uniqueness of its position in the system of sciences - as a science both humanitarian and natural at the same time, studying both internal and external (behavioral) manifestations of the psyche. Such an independent position of psychology was also recorded with the appearance of psychology as a subject of study at universities in the late 18th - early 19th centuries.

Thus, it is more correct to talk about the emergence of psychology as an independent science precisely from this period, referring to the middle of the 19th century. the formation of experimental psychology.

But in any case, it must be admitted that the period of existence of psychology as an independent science is much shorter than the period of its development in the mainstream of philosophy. Naturally, this period is not homogeneous, and psychological science has undergone significant changes over more than 20 centuries. The subject of psychology, the content of psychological research, and the relationship of psychology with other sciences also changed.

For a long time, the subject of psychology was the soul (see Table 1), however, at different times, different content was put into this concept. In the era of antiquity, the soul was understood as the fundamental principle of the body, by analogy with the concept of "archee" - the fundamental principle of the world, the basic brick of which everything that exists. In this case, the main function of the soul was considered to make the body active, since, according to the first scientists-psychologists, the body is an inert mass, which is set in motion by the soul. The soul not only provides energy for activity, but also directs it, that is, it is the soul that directs human behavior.

In the Middle Ages, the soul was a subject of study primarily for theology (see Table 1), which significantly narrowed the possibilities of its scientific knowledge. Therefore, although formally the subject of psychological science has not changed, in fact, the area of ​​research at that time included the study of the types of activity of the body and the characteristics of cognition, primarily sensory cognition of the world.

Regulatory function, volitional behavior, logical thinking were considered the prerogative of the divine will, the divinely inspired, and not the material soul. It is not for nothing that these aspects of mental life were not parts of the subject of scientific study in the concepts of deism and Thomism (Avicenna, F. Aquinas, F. Bacon and other scientists).

Table 1

The main stages of the development of psychology

Stage and time	The subject of psychology, its content		Psychic research methods	Major achievements
Pre-scientific, until the VIIVI centuries. BC.	Soul - without revealing its specific content and functions		Not	General understanding of the protective and active role of the soul
Philosophical, VII - VI centuries. BC. - late 18th - early 19th century	Ancient psychology	The soul is the source of the body's activity, has the functions of cognition and regulation of behavior	There are no special methods, methods of other sciences - philosophy, medicine, mathematics - are used in the study of the content and functions of the soul	Determination of the main problems of psychology associated with the study of cognition, body activity, methods of regulating behavior and the limits of human freedom
	Psychology of the Middle Ages	Soul, study of the types of activity of the body and the characteristics of cognition, primarily sensory cognition of the world	The emergence of a proper psychological method - introspection	Development of psychophysical research and the first works on mass psychology
	Psychology of the Renaissance and Modern Times	Consciousness - its content and ways of its formation	Introspection and partly logic - methods of induction, deduction, analysis, etc.	The development of a rationalistic and sensational (empirical) approach to the psyche, the emergence of the first theories of emotions and the theory of the reflex, as well as the first attempt to introduce the unconscious into the subject of psychology
Associative psychology, late 18th - early 19th centuries –The middle of the 19th century.	Consciousness, consisting of sensations, ideas and feelings. Thus, the subject of psychology is primarily cognitive processes, as well as (at the end of this period) behavior		Introspection, logic, beginning to use natural science methods, in particular trial and error (in the formation of behavior)	The emergence of the first psychological school, new approaches to the subject and methods of psychology, the concept of the adaptive function of the psyche, the development of the reflex theory, a natural scientific approach to the study of the psyche, further development of the concepts of the unconscious
Experimental psychology, mid-19th - early 20th centuries	Elements of the psyche, identified mainly with consciousness, their connections and laws		The experimental method, as well as introspection and analysis of the results of the creative activity of both a person and the people as a whole, the appearance of the first tests	The emergence of experimental psychology, the first theories of the "psychology of peoples", new data on mental processes (primarily memory). The emergence of new approaches to psychology, the first symptoms of a methodological crisis
Methodological crisis and the division of psychology into separate schools, 10-30s of the XX century.	The emergence of several subjects of psychology. In the beginning - the elements of the psyche (structuralism), the functions of the psyche, the "stream of consciousness" (functionalism). Then - the deep structures of the psyche (depth psychology), behavior (behaviorism), structures of the psyche (gestalt psychology), higher mental functions and activities (Soviet psychology)		The emergence of new methods, the most important of which are psychoanalysis and projective methods (depth psychology), the experimental study of the learning process, the formation of a connection between stimulus and response (behaviorism), the experimental study of cognitive processes and needs (gestalt psychology), the instrumental method (Soviet psychology)	The emergence of the first concepts of personality, the theory of consciousness, including altered consciousness, theories of learning and developmental learning, creative thinking. The emergence of the first experimental studies of personality, the introduction of culture and social environment into its study as new paradigms. Development of branches of psychology
Further development of psychological schools, 40-60s of the XX century.	The emergence of new directions for which the subject of psychology is associated with the inner essence of the personality (humanistic, existential psychology), cognitive processes, the development of intelligence and stages of information processing (genetic and cognitive psychology)		The emergence of questionnaires, new experimental methods for studying intelligence, including artificial intelligence	Further development of theoretical concepts in line with the main problems of psychology, development and improvement of psychotherapeutic technologies
Modern psychology, 60s - late XX century	Development of the subject of psychology within the framework of individual psychological schools		Improvement of methods of experimental research of the psyche, the emergence of a variety of diagnostic techniques	The emergence of a trend towards unification, synthesis of the most significant achievements of individual schools

In modern times, psychology, like other sciences, got rid of the dictates of theology. Science strove again, as in the period of antiquity, to become objective, rational, and not sacred, that is, based on evidence, on reason, and not on faith. The problem of the subject of psychology arose again with all its urgency. At this time, it was still impossible to completely abandon the theological approach to understanding the soul. Therefore, psychology changes its subject, becoming the science of consciousness, i.e. about the content of consciousness and the ways of its formation. This made it possible to separate the subject of psychology from the subject of theology in the study of the soul and its functions.