A history of psychology main currents in psychological thought Thomas Hardy Leahey.

Por:

Leahey, Thomas Hardy

Detalles de publicación: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall c1980.Descripción: xii, 431 p. ill. 24 cmISBN:

013391755X

Tema(s):

Psychology -- History

Clasificación CDD:

150/.9

Clasificación LoC:

BF81 .L4

Existencias
Imagen de cubierta	Tipo de ítem	Biblioteca actual	Biblioteca de origen	Colección	Ubicación en estantería	Signatura topográfica	Materiales especificados	Info Vol	URL	Copia número	Estado	Notas	Fecha de vencimiento	Código de barras	Reserva de ítems	Prioridad de la cola de reserva de ejemplar	Reservas para cursos
	Libro	Biblioteca Encarnación Valdés Colección General bev				150.9 L434h (Navegar estantería(Abre debajo))					Disponible			80000001063117

Total de reservas: 0

Includes index.

Bibliography: p. 405-416.

Extracto provisto por Syndetics

FROM PREVIOUS PREFACES One should always read a book's preface to find why the author wrote the book, the author's goals and orientation, and who and what influenced the author's ideas. In a book that has been through many editions, the preface will reveal how the author's views have changed, what is new, and what has been abandoned. Human beings make history--political, military, social, and scientific. In the history of science, ideas are especially important, for science is a changing collection of ideas to which short-lived human beings make contributions. This is not to deny that human personalities and institutions play a role in shaping science; but it is to say that the history of science can be written and studied in more than one way. One may choose to study the history of a science as a succession of great scientists and their major contributions to the field. Or one may study the history of a science as an institution, recording the founding of laboratories and the intellectual genealogies of generations of scientists. Or, finally, one may study the history of a science solely as a collection of scientific concepts that evolve over time, paying relatively little attention to the personal histories of the scientists who formulate the concepts or the laboratories that put them to the test. Since historians have limited space at their disposal, they cannot practice all three kinds of scientific history, no matter how desirable that might be. In this book, I try to take a balanced approach, discussing concepts, psychological thinkers, and institutions. Another important option is open to a historian of science. Older histories of the sciences were generally internal histories, considering the development of the technical ideas of each science independent of the broader intellectual and social context in which the science operated. More recently, histories of the sciences have tended to be external histories, considering the outside intellectual and social context and its effects on the development of the science. Again, I have tried to balance internal and external approaches. I always place the development of psychological thought in its historical context, but I also try to capture the arguments that psychologists have had about their subject matter as a science. No historian can be neutral to the subject matter. Historians must care about it enough to want to understand it and to make it come alive for others. Historians must be fair; they must weigh argument and counterargument; and finally, they must choose. Historians must choose some facts over others, for they cannot record everything. They must choose to discuss some thinkers and not others, for not all are equally great--although greatness is hard to define. Historians must choose some concepts over others, for some have survived while others have become extinct. They must choose some interpretation to put on the facts, events, people, and concepts written about, for history is an understanding of the past. One of the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus reads, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." The distinguished historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin, used this cryptic fragment to represent one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on the one side the hedgehogs, who relate everything to single central vision . . . a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side the foxes, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and often contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way . . . . (The Hedgehog and the Fox, Toughstone, New York, 1954). Dame was a hedgehog; Shakespeare a fox. Plato, who devised an ideal Republic, was a hedgehog; Socrates, the gadfly on the rump of the state, was a fox. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I thought I was a hedgehog, a rationalist, albeit at times an uncomfortable one. I have found out, however, that I am a fox and am happy to be so. As we will see, the tension between hedgehogs and foxes has been an important one in the history of psychology. Foxes make better historians because they attend to the daily contradictions and concrete reality of life as people live it and are not earned away by sweeping generalities that erase the specificities of history. Hedgehog historians are wont to paint over the contradictions and grit of life with a glossy, superficial sheen of abstractions. The hedgehog, if he or she notices the messiness of history at all, is likely to be downcast by people's inconsistencies and cross-purposes, especially if he or she is a historian of science, which thinks itself a rational enterprise. The fox is at home with history's disorder and confusion and tries to tell an instructive and entertaining tale of human life. I became a fox by writing with my wife, Grace ( Psychology's Occult Doubles: Psychology and the Problem of Pseudoscience, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983). There I set out (she was always more skeptical) to find the essence of science, believing that even if other fields are too self-contradictory to have an essence, science is not, having some central method or attitude apart from its substantive concepts. However, at the end I concluded that science is only a set of beliefs held by scientists, and that all but two beliefs have changed over the centuries. The older, dating back to the ancient Greeks, is naturalism, explaining the world without reference to supernatural entities or events. Hence "creation science" is an oxymoron, because even if creationism is true (which I don't believe), it cannot be part of science. The second belief, defining modern science, comes from Newton and says that science explains events as outcomes to timeless, universal natural laws. These beliefs, however, merely define science as a Western social institution; they are not essential Truths. Having become a fox, and agreeing with Giambattista Vico that "The useful historians are not those who give general descriptions of facts and explain them by reference to general conditions, but those who go into the greatest detail and reveal the particular cause of each event," I have tried to write a narrative history, more chronological and less conceptually driven. The purpose of this book, and of the course for which you are using it, is to give you a chance to work out your own point of view. The concepts and issues you learn about in a content course do not exist in a vacuum. They arose and existed in a particular historical context. The questions asked in today's research are the outcome of a historical process, and the answers given contribute to that process. You are given an opportunity to see the historical context and the historical process, to reflect on psychology as it is--and on your own experiences as a student of psychology. Your reflection on psychology's past and present state is an important part of fording your identity within psychology. You should come away from your experience not with a list of names, dates, and events, but with an understanding of what psychology is and of your own relation to it. You should not be a passive recorder, but rather an explorer of the past and great minds. The first task is dull and bloodless; the second is an adventure and full of life. The fifth edition of A History of Psychology represented continued evolution of the text. I tried to unify the narrative by more strongly emphasizing themes based on articles of mine that provide short overviews of the history of psychology. They are "Mind as a Scientific Object: A Historical-Philosophical Survey" for D. Johnson and C. Erneling (Eds.), Mind as Scientific Object (Oxford University Press, in press), and "The History of Psychology: Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century" and "The History of Psychology: The Nineteenth Century," for the APA/Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Psychology (2002). Various passages from these pieces will be found in the present text. More importantly, writing these articles led me to take a synoptic look at the development of psychology and compress it into a small space. I have brought my stronger feel for the evolution of psychology to the revision of this book. In the fifth edition, I emphasize three themes that are relatively new. One is the idea that not only is psychology necessarily a social construction because it is a social institution--that idea has been present from the outset--but that the mind itself is to some degree a social construction. Related to this is the concept of consciousness that has been central to psychology's history since the Scientific Revolution. The idea of consciousness would have puzzled the ancients, but we take it for granted. Thus, the second theme involves our struggles over the existence and nature of consciousness, particularly the tension between the "Way of Ideas"--the representational theory of consciousness introduced by Descartes and Locke--and the realist rejection of the Cartesian theory. The third theme was applied psychology. I now appreciate that the use of psychological ideas to change people and control society had an older and deeper history than I had previously thought, and I have tried to reflect this in the text at various places. By the way, I had an odd author's experience connected with the first edition. In a 1996 episode of the TV show X-Files concerning gargoyles, Agent Minder goes to a library to do some research. While watching the show, I suddenly noticed that on the top of a pile of books next to Minder was a copy of A History of Psychology 's first edition! I confirmed my sighting by freezing the tape in my VCR. I had achieved a very small two seconds of fame. FOR THE SIXTH EDITION Here are the most important changes between the fifth and sixth editions: Pedagogy Glossary. I have assembled a glossary of terms, focusing on terms that occur in more than one chapter. Each chapter concludes with a list of its glossary terms. References. In previous editions, each chapter ended with a reference section. At the suggestion of reviewers, I have assembled all the references into a single reference section for the entire book. Photographs and Drawings. At the suggestion of reviewers, more photographs and drawings have been included in the present edition to clarify and amplify the text. I have incorporated all the revisions from A History of Modern Psychology, third edition, including rearranging the last four chapters of the book. Instead of treating the twentieth century chronologically, as in previous editions, I now tell the story of scientific psychology in the twentieth century in chapters 11-12 and the story of applied psychology in the twentieth century in chapters 13-14. The emphasis in the fifth edition on the close interrelation of psychology and society has been strengthened. In chapter 2, I have tried to show how the moral and political values of the Greeks shaped their views on mind and behavior. Following the atrocities of September 11, 2001, many people asked how Western and Muslim cultures could have become so estranged. One aspect of the different historical developments of the Western and Muslim worlds is why modern science developed in Europe rather than in Islam, even though Islam had retained much more of the ancient philosophical and scientific legacy of Greece and Rome. This question had begun to be addressed by scholars before 9/11, and in chapter 4, I discuss their conclusions that social conditions in Europe were more favorable to the rise of science than social conditions in Islam. Chapter 5 has been revised to reflect recent scholarship showing that the Enlightenment was not led by French philosophies, but developed along different paths in different countries. I would like to thank the following reviewers of the fifth edition in preparation for the sixth: Lori VanWallendael, UNC Charlotte; Scott Terry, UNC Charlotte; John Mavromatic, St. John Fisher College; Robert Bothwell, U. Louisiana, Lafeyette. I hope that readers find this new edition of A History of Psychology an improvement on the last. As always, I welcome comments from students, professors, and general readers. You may e-mail me at tleahey@vcu.edu. THOMAS HARDY LEAHEY Richmond, Virginia April 2003 Excerpted from A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological by Thomas H. Leahey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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