(May 14, 2021 at 12:26 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 13, 2021 at 11:51 pm)Belacqua Wrote: I have a book on my shelf here called Plato's Psychology. And it's pretty clear that Plato was reacting to Heraclitus and Parmenides. So they'd win the prize for earliness, I'm pretty sure. Plotinus seems to be the first person to suggest that people have a part of their minds of which they are not conscious -- later called a subconscious.
When I did my undergraduates a few years ago, we were required to take a course called History and Systems in Psychology. The entire first half of the course, which I thought would begin with Freud, was a history in the philosophy of mind. I didn't value it at the time, but the impression the course left was that there was a clear passing of the baton from philosophy to science in the study of mind. Descartes, John Locke, Berkeley, and almost every major thinker in history has addressed the mind question. Galileo himself divided reality into what he called primary and secondary qualities, which is something like the sensation/perception distinction.
This sounds like a brilliant course. Not immediately applicable, maybe, but any new and way-out idea that might pop up in psychology would almost certainly be more comprehensible with this class under your belt.
My nephew got a degree in psych recently from a fairly big-shot university, and talking to him it's clear that he never had a class like this. Nor did he have to read any Freud or Jung. I'm not sure where they started, but it was very much based on whatever practical treatments are considered best these days. Career training, really, not theoretical at all.
You know way more about the field than I do, but it seems to me that science and philosophy will have to continue in dialectic on theories of mind, for the time being at least.
