The Story of Psychology (Revised Edition with Illustrations)

Author: Li Hansong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-11-01
Features: Aristotle, a student of Plato, the court teacher of Alexander the Great during the height of the Macedonian Kingdom, was an outstanding thinker and philosopher. Aristotle took advantage of his privileged position to systematically collect and organize a large amount of literature, writing books and establishing his own theoretical system. His work On the Soul is a seminal on psychology in European history. He used contemporary biological knowledge to explain psychological phenomena and systematically discussed various aspects of the mind. Aristotle opposed Plato's theory of Forms. He believed that the world of Forms was imaginary and contradicted the real world, which was the true reality. The soul is the form, and the body is the matter; the two are united and inseparable. Their relationship is like "cutting" to "axe"—without the "axe," "cutting" does not exist. However, he regarded the soul as the essence of life, with the body merely as a tool for the soul. Only the soul could enable the body to move. Thus, in terms of the mind-body relationship, he was an idealist who believed that the soul's form determines the body's matter. In psychological classification, Aristotle opposed Plato's tripartite division of knowledge, emotion, and will, emphasizing that the soul is a whole and cannot be divided into parts. He classified souls according to different biological hierarchies, proposing that plants possess a soul for nutrition and digestion, animals possess a soul for sensation, and humans possess a rational soul. Higher souls contain all lower souls, and humans are the highest, possessing all three souls, which work together in unity and inseparability within the human body. Additionally, he classified souls based on their functions, proposing that the human soul has two functions: rational and irrational. The irrational function is passive and dies with the body; the rational function of the soul is active, and after the body dies, the soul returns to a pure form. In this way, Aristotle once again returned to his idealist view that form determines matter. In sensory psychology, Aristotle made significant contributions. First, he regarded sensation as a necessary means for animal survival, proposing that the characteristic of sensation is discrimination. For example, vision can distinguish black and white, and taste can distinguish sweet and bitter. Animals, with this innate sense of discrimination, can perceive objects at a certain distance, make approach or avoidance movements, and thus maintain survival and reproduction. Second, he acknowledged that the effect of external objects is the cause of sensation. Without the influence of external objects, sensation cannot occur, and objects exist prior to sensation. Third, he believed that the impressions produced by the sensory process are truthful and do not lead to errors. He compared the sensory impressions or traces produced by the effect of external objects on the senses to the imprint of a gold ring on wax—true and accurate. Fourth, he divided sensation into special and common senses. Special senses include vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Each sense has a specific object: vision perceives color, hearing perceives sound, smell perceives odor, etc. Each sense and its object have their own medium: transparency is the medium for vision, air is the medium for hearing, and the body is the medium for touch. He provided a certain biological description for each sense. Touch is the most primitive sense.