Natural science, Empiricism and Metaphysics

What happened during 18th centuries

Goran Kardum

  • During the eighteenth century, as in the seventeenth, “psychology” was the science of mind or soul. or of mental phenomena; as such, it was known under many names, deriving from “psyche”, “anima”, “soul”, “mind”, and their cognates.
  • Christian Wolff place the psychology under the rubric of metaphysics rather than physics (Vidal, 2000)
  • By mid-century, psychology in Germany was primarily empirical, and was the object of numerous publications; sometimes called Erfahrungsseelenlehre, it had object of numerous publications; it had moved from metaphysics to the “science of man” that prospered under various names (Menschenkunde, Menschenlehre).

Christian Wolff

  • Eminent German philosophers between Leibniz and Kant. A key figure of the German Enlightenment.
  • Christian Wolff was a prominent German philosopher, mathematician, and jurist
  • Born: January 24, 1679, Wrocław, Poland
  • Died: April 9, 1754, Halle (Saale), Germany
  • The Ground Zero of Modern Psychology? (Klempe, 2020)

Christian Wolff

  • Wundt often refers to Wolff, and Wolff must therefore be seen as a prerequisite for psychology
  • Wolff creating the foundational distinction between (based on experience/introspection) and (based on reason)
  • Establishing psychology as a distinct field seeking scientific laws for the soul
  • Psychologia empirica (1732)
  • Psychologia rationalis (1734)
  • Psychology as independent science and also experience-based science

Wolff definition and influence

  • Discursus praeliminaris Wolff defines psychology: “That part of philosophy which treats of the soul, I call psychology. Thus psychology is the science of whatever is possible through human souls”
  • Impact to Kant: A Wolff in Kant’s Clothing: Christian Wolff’s Influence on Kant’s Accounts of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Psychology (Dyck, 2011)
  • In the Empirical Psychology, Wolff’s analysis of consciousness revolves around three fundamental concepts: thinking (cogitare), perceiving (percipere) and apperceiving (appercipere) (Sala, 2024)

Immmanuel Kant (1724-1804)

  • Kant position: psychology as a systematic but inherently limited discipline, focusing on inner experience (Critique of Introspection)
  • He proposed a faculty psychology (cognition, feeling, willing) and argued the mind isn’t a blank slate but organizes the world into phenomena (how things appear) versus the unknowable noumena (things-in-themselves)
  • Significantly influenced modern cognitive psychology, especially concepts of mental frameworks (schemata) and the foundation for cognitive therapies

Immanuel Kant

  • Psychology, or Anthropology, as Kant would prefer to call it is wholly empirical but it could never be a science
  • Kant argued because mental phenomena are in the flux of time and therefore incapable of measurement.
  • Phenomena vs. Noumena: We only experience the world as it appears to us (phenomena), filtered by our minds, not the world as it is in itself (noumena).
  • Reason is the source of morality

Influence to…

  • Cognitive Science: His idea of the mind as an organizer of sensory input laid groundwork for cognitive psychology and concepts like schemas (J. Piaget).
  • Cognitive Therapies: “Kantian spectacles” concept—that reality is filtered through cognitive templates… foundational to therapies like CBT (Aaron Beck) and REBT (Albert Ellis).

Ferdinand Ueberwasser

  • (1752–1812)
  • Jesuit novice
  • Philosopher, metaphysicist, and psychologist
  • 100 years before Wilhelm Wundt talks about empirical and independent scientific discipline (Schwarz & Pfister, 2016)
  • Ueberwasser’s (1787) Instructions presents an extensive, structured approach to empirical psychology.

Gnothi Sauton

  • Karl Philipp Moritz’s Gnothi Sauton (Greek for “Know Thyself”) was a pioneering German journal (1783–1793)
  • Focused on empirical psychology, featuring case studies of mental and nervous disorders
  • A journal, Gnothi Sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Journal of Empirical Psychology), the first of its kind

Gnothi Sauton

  • Content: Detailed accounts of epilepsy, dementia, aphasia, and other conditions… focusing on disturbances of language and consciousness (Forstl, 1992)
  • Significance: a shift from literary interest to empirical science in studying the mind, providing a model for future psychological journals.
  • Impact: Case materials were translated and influenced later psychiatric thought.

  • Authors, theories, and events in the 18th century had their own incredible influence on authors and theories of the 19th century

  • This is especially true of the tension between empiricism and metaphysics

Predecessors of Wundt

  • Psychophysicists Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) mathematical tools in the study of the human mind.
  • Neuroanatomists Paul Broca (1824–1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848-1905): physiological approach to understanding the human mind, and integrative work
  • Philosophers such as Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) and Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–1881): theoretical frameworks and structured understanding of psychological phenomena.

Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878)

  • A pioneer of psychophysics, formulating the concept of the just-noticeable difference (JND) and what became Weber’s Law
  • Quantifying how stimulus perception relates to physical intensity
  • It states that the just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is a function of the magnitude of the original stimulus
  • He came to the conclusion that the intensity of a sensation increases with the logarithm of the intensity of the stimulus (Weber-Fechner’s psychophysical law)
  • He discovered the inhibitory action of the vagus nerve on cardiac action, and measured the velocity of blood flow.

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887)

  • Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) is one of the most enigmatic thinkers of nineteenth century German philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • On the one hand, Fechner had deep positivist proclivities, which made him advocate the strictest standards of observation and measurement in science
  • On the other hand, Fechner also had a desperate longing for metaphysics, for a complete vision of the entire cosmos, which his piecemeal scientific work could never satisfy.
  • Fechner was a pioneering theorist of the unconscious mind

Fechners works

  • Zend-Avesta is Fechner’s most personal work
  • Fechner’s natural religion was decidedly not Christianity (denial of a transcendent dimension beyond nature)
  • His insistence that the mental be embodied in the physical (he believed in panpsychism)
  • Panpsychism is the philosophical view that mind or consciousness is a fundamental, universal feature of reality, present in everything from subatomic particles
  • Major contribution to psychology was founding Psychophysics (Mind-Body connection), an experimental approach to quantify the relationship between physical stimuli and subjective mental sensations
  • His own religion as a synthesis of Christianity and paganism (Fechner 1879: 71 cited by SEP)

References

Dyck, C. W. (2011). A wolff in kant’s clothing: Christian wolff’s influence on kant’s accounts of consciousness, self‐consciousness, and psychology. Philosophy Compass, 6(1), 44–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00370.x
Forstl, H. (1992). Neurologic disease described in the journal of empirical psychology (gnothi sauton oder magazin zur erfahrungsseelenkunde), 1783-1793. Archives of Neurology, 49(2), 187–188. https://doi.org/10.1001/archneur.1992.00530260089026
Klempe, S. H. (2020). Tracing the emergence of psychology, 15201750: A sophisticated intruder to philosophy. Springer International.
Pfister, R., & Schwarz, K. A. (2018). Should we pre-date the beginning of scientific psychology to 1787? Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02481
Sala, L. (2024). Wolff’s theory of consciousness, re‐examined. European Journal of Philosophy, 33(3), 871–889. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13037
Schwarz, K. A., & Pfister, R. (2016). Scientific Psychology in the 18th Century: A Historical Rediscovery. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(3), 399–407. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26358629
Vidal, F. (2000). The Eighteenth Century as "Century of Psychology". Jahrbuch Für Recht Und Ethik / Annual Review of Law and Ethics, 8, 407–434. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43579329