Psychology

Gaius Plinius Secundus, called Pliny the Elder, writes the monumental Historia naturalis, the earliest truly encyclopedic work, published in 77 as a series of anthologies concerned with such scientific and technical topics as anthropology, botany, cosmography, metallurgy, psychology, pharmacology, and zoology.

Apuleius’ picaresque romance, Metamorphoses, later called The Golden Ass (Asinus Aureus), is the only Latin novel that has survived in its entirety.

Lucian’s True History is the earliest known fiction about traveling to outer space, alien life-forms and interplanetary warfare.

Artemidorus, in his book Oneirocritica, documents and interprets thousands of dream reports.

Artemidorus documents and interprets thousands of dream reports around 150 in his book Oneirocritica (a combination of the Greek oneiros, "dream," and kritikos, "critical").

Unlike his predecessors Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, who believed that dreams often contained physiological information that heralded future medical illnesses, Artemidorus maintains that symbols in dreams do not have one universal meaning.

Pélerin de Maricourt and the Foundations of Magnetism (1269)

The first detailed description of magnetic poles and the laws of magnetic attraction and repulsion can be found in the writings of Pélerin de Maricourt, also known as Peregrinus. In 1269, he composed a letter on magnetism, providing groundbreaking observations that would lay the foundation for later studies in electromagnetism and navigation.

Key Discoveries in Magnetism

• Identification of Magnetic Poles

  • Pélerin de Maricourt was the first to describe the poles of a magnet, distinguishing between north-seeking and south-seeking ends.
  • He also noted the nonexistence of isolated magnetic poles, an insight that remains fundamental to modern physics.

• Magnetic Attraction and Repulsion

  • His experiments demonstrated that like poles repel while opposite poles attract, a principle that governs the behavior of magnets to this day.

• Compasses and Navigation

  • In his letter, Peregrinus explains how to identify the poles of compasses, crucial for improving navigational accuracy.
  • He describes various types of compasses, including a design that could guide travelers to cities, islands, and any place in the world.

Impact on Maritime Exploration

The increasing perfection of magnetic compasses in the 13th century, bolstered by Peregrinus’s findings, significantly advanced open-sea navigation.

• This would enable explorers like Vandino and Ugolino Vivaldi to embark on voyages to unknown lands, marking the beginning of European maritime expansion.
• His work also laid the groundwork for later scholars such as William Gilbert (1600), whose treatise De Magnete built upon Peregrinus’s medieval observations.

Legacy

Pélerin de Maricourt’s letter of 1269 stands as one of the earliest scientific treatises on magnetism, demonstrating systematic experimentation and observation. His discoveries not only enhanced navigation but also anticipated key principles of electromagnetism, making him a pivotal figure in the history of physics.

Juan Luis Vives is a Spanish humanist, born in Valencia to a family that had converted to Christianity, had seen his father, grandmother and great-grandfather, as well as members of their wider family, executed as Judaizers at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition; his mother had been acquitted but died of the plague when he was fifteen years old.

He left Spain shortly thereafter never to return.

While still in Spain, he had attended the Valencia Academy, where he was taught by Jerome Amiguetus and Daniel Siso.

The school is dominated by scholasticism, with the dialectic and disputation playing a central role in the delivery of education.

He had had studied at Paris from 1509 to 1512 and had in 1519 been appointed professor of the humanities at Louvain.

A student of Erasmus, Vives had dedicated his commentary on St. Augustine's De civitate Dei, written in 1522, to Henry VIII of England.

He moves to England in 1523 to take an appointment as preceptor to Mary, princess of Wales, and lectures on philosophy at Oxford.

In this year, he completes De ratione studii puerilis ("On the Right Method of Instruction for Children"), for which he gains renown, and begins lecturing at Oxford.

Vives resides at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he has been made doctor of laws and lectured on philosophy.

His most important pedagogic works are Introductio ad sapientiam (1524); De disciplinis, which stresses the urgent importance of more rational programs of studying; De prima philosophia; and the Exercitatio linguae latinae, a Latin textbook.

His philosophical works include De anima et vita (1538), De veritate fidei Christianae; and "De Subventione Pauperum Sive de Humanis Necessitatibus" (On Assistance To The Poor) (1526), the first tract of its kind in the Western world to treat the problem of urban poverty and propose concrete suggestions for a policy of social legislation.

Vives detects through philological analysis that the supposed author of the so-called Letter of Aristeas, purporting to describe the Biblical translation of the Septuagint, could not have been a Greek but must have been a Jew who lived after the events he described had transpired.

Having declared himself against the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Vives loses royal favor and is confined to his house for six weeks.

On his release, he withdraws to Bruges, where he will devote the rest of his life to the composition of numerous works, chiefly directed against the scholastic philosophy and the preponderant unquestioning authority of Aristotle.

The most important of his treatises is the De Causis Corruptarum Artium, which has been ranked with Bacon's Organon.

James Mill’s “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” published in 1829, is a milestone in the field of psychology.

The most important philosophical work of the Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher, it provides the psychological basis for the ethics required by utilitarianism by demonstrating how the principles of association at work in the mind operate on the materials generated by sense experience to produce new, or derived, mental phenomena.

People are held to be similar to complex machines in psychophysics, a new scientific paradigm that becomes popular in Germany around 1860.

This paradigm will lead to the experimental psychology paradigm which will attempt to discover the nature of humans and how to control it.

Many of the classical techniques and theory of psychophysics are formulated in 1860 when Gustav Fechner publishes Elemente der Psychophysik.

He coins the term "psychophysics", and describes research relating physical stimuli with how they are perceived and set out the philosophical foundations of the field.

Fechner wants to develop a theory that can relate matter to the mind, by describing the relationship between the world and the way it is perceived

Wilhelm Wundt, combining philosophical introspection with techniques and laboratory apparatuses brought over from his physiological studies with Hermann von Helmholtz, as well as many of his own design, completes the first work on experimental psychology, Beitrage zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception), in 1862, decisively separating the study of the mind from rational philosophy and metaphysics.

Wilhelm Wundt's Principles of Physiological Psychology the first textbook pertaining to the field of psychology. published in 1874, will come to be one of the most important in the history of psychology.

The Principles utilizes a system of psychology that seeks to investigate the immediate experiences of consciousness, including feelings, emotions, volitions and ideas, mainly explored through Wundt's system of "internal perception", or the self-examination of conscious experience by objective observation of one's consciousness.

Wilhelm Wundt was born at Neckarau, Baden (now part of Mannheim) on August 16th, 1832, the fourth child to parents Maximilian Wundt (a Lutheran minister), and his wife Marie Frederike.

When Wundt was about four years old, his family moved to Heidelsheim, a small town.

He had studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, University of Heidelberg, and the University of Berlin, and after graduating in medicine from Heidelberg in 1856, had studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller, before joining the University's staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858.

There he had written Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception (1858–62)

He had married Sophie Mau while at Heidelberg

It was during this period that Wundt had offered the first course ever taught in scientific psychology, all the while stressing the use of experimental methods drawn from the natural sciences, emphasizing the physiological relationship of the human brain and the mind

His background in physiology had had a great effect on his approach to the new science of psychology.

His lectures on psychology had been published as Lectures on the Mind of Humans and Animals in 1863-1864

He had been promoted to Assistant Professor of Physiology at Heidelberg in 1864

Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Fechner, who worked at Leipzig, had inspired Wundt's interest in neuropsychology.

He wrote a textbook about human physiology in 1865.

In 1867, he became a professor in acquainting medical students with the exact physical needs for medical investigation and became a professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich in 1874, before moving back to Leipzig.