Antiquity and Middle Ages

Goran Kardum

The philosophers: Psychology through antiquity and middle ages

There is scarcely a major topic in today’s textbooks of introductory psychology that was not anticipated, at least in rudimentary form, by the Greek philosophers (Hunt, 2009)

  • Aniquity and Middle ages philosophers did not use the term “psychology” (did not exist until A.D. 1520, Marko Marulic… Rudolph Goclenius arround 1590)
  • They use different distinct area of knowledge
  • They were questioned more fundamental the structure of matter and the nature of causality

Roots

Two different tradition: - the philosophical tradition (from Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustin, St. T. Aquinas) - medical tradition (Hippocrates and Galen): interdependence/interchanges between body and brain, mind and soul

Old and contemporary problems

  • Is there only one substance, or is “mind” something different from “matter”?

  • Do we have souls? Do they exist after the body dies?

  • How are mind and body connected? Is mind part of soul, and if so can it exist apart from the body?

  • Is human nature the product of inborn tendencies or of experience and upbringing?

  • How do we know what we know? Are our ideas built into our minds, or do we develop them from our perceptions and experiences?

  • How does perception work? Are our impressions of the world around us true representations of what is out there? How can we know whether they are or not?

  • Which is the right road to true knowledge—pure reasoning or data gathered by observation?

  • What are the principles of valid thinking?

  • What are the causes of invalid thinking?

  • Does the mind rule the emotions, or vice versa?

Why go back to Middle Ages?

  • engagement with questions of mind, body and affect
  • development of deep and sophisticated thinking throughout experience and introspection about psychology
  • medieval texts open onto a psychology that was not dominated, as many recent discourses are, by essentially Cartesian notions of mind–body dualism.
  • before Descartes, mind and body are very close to modern flavour!

Psychology during Middle Ages

  • theologians were interested in questions of desire, will, intention, sin and virtue
  • Medieval thinkers resisted reducing the soul/mind to the brain while at the same time avoiding dualism.
  • St Thomas Aquinas (13th century) - human as a compound of body and soul/mind.

Medieval time

Psychology can be understood as a development of Cartesian ideas about the separation of mind from body but what happened during medieval time?

  • Hippocrates’ theory of the four humours (Galen, second century), idea of a mind–body continuum, for humours shaped both mind and body
  • The distinction between mind and body was complex and more fluid than in post-Cartesian thought
  • Complicated by ideas of the soul and connection between soul and spiritual world
  • Integration of thought and affect (cognition and emotion).

Go back and compare

  • Aristotle had situated the rational or intellective quality within the soul, and had located the heart as the centre of the senses and cognitive faculties
  • Galen associated these with the brain.
  • Neo-Platonic theories situated the immortal and rational part of the soul in the head, and the appetites and emotions in the trunk of the body.
  • St Augustine (fourth century) saw the will as a faculty of the (superior) soul and associated emotions with the (lower) body, but also saw emotions as having both cognitive and bodily aspects (kemp1990?)

At the end of medieval period

12th, 13th century…

  • Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon developed complex theories of mind
  • Observations of the effects of head injuries had confirmed Galen’s view that the rational aspects of the psyche were located in the brain
  • that persists through the Middle Ages and beyond of the heart as the site of understanding and feeling
  • The main work was done by the cerebral ventricles, which housed the ‘inner senses’: from the external senses and constructing thoughts from their component concepts or ‘forms’ (imagines or phantasmata).
  • Aristotle’s theory: mental processes were housed in organs of the body vs. Galen proposed that memory was in the cortex of the brain.

Inner senses

The scholastic theory of the Inner senses can be viewed as an attempt to explain and classify cognitive abilities based on anathomy and physiology of brain:

  • the concept of the inner senses is rooted in Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) remarks on postsensory faculties of the soul in the second and third books of De Anima and in De memoria et reminiscentia.
  • A model listing three “inner” psychic faculties, assigned to three cerebral ventricles (imagination/front ventricle, intellective faculty/middle ventricle, memory/rear ventricle)
  • Galen (129–c. 199) via Nemesius’s (fourth century AD) De natura hominis
  • John Damascene’s (c. 675–749) De fide orthodoxa

Inner senses

  • St. Augustine (354–430) was the first to use the Latin term sensus interior, meaning Aristotle’s common sense (Confessions)
  • St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) calls the common sense the “root and principle” of the external senses
  • Aquinas’s fourfold list of inner senses (Summa Theologiae): imagination (imaginatio sive phantasia ), the functioning as storage for sensible forms, the estimative power (vis aestimativa ), and the memory (vis memorativa, memoria sive reminiscentia ).

Cognition in medieval texts

Ancient and medieval writers on memory recognized, as we now do, the dual aspects of storage and recollection involved in remembering (carruthers2002?)

Four humours

Balance and dynamic interplay of the cerebral faculties:

  • connection of bodily humours end emotions
  • Hippocrates (460 B.C - 377 B.C.) humors theory is the most influential theory in the medicine before modern age
  • blood (corresponding to fire), phlegm (corresponding to water), black bile (corresponding to earth), and yellow bile (corresponding to air)
  • Galen (129 A.D. to 217 A.D.) suggested that our dreams could also be used as indicators of which humors were in excess or shortage
  • The theory of the inner senses would remain the dominant theory of cognitive functioning until the mid-sixteenth century whereas the humors theory continued to be widely accepted through to the late eighteenth century (17thstreet2013?)

Concepts of cognitive processes

  • memoria as universal thinking machine (carruthers2002?)
  • technology for meditation incorporating emotions, memory and motivation
  • spatial rather then temporal properties of memory representation
  • soul, mind, intellect,thought, emotion, affect, senses and body - all intimately connected in medieval thinking

Emotions in medieval thinking

  • Medieval texts - interdependence of mind and body, cognition and affect with awareness of the supernatural; God and devil, angels, demons and ghosts (Sounders, 2016)
  • for contemporary neuroscientists: the cognitive is always emotional and emotional is always cognitive
  • Emotions plays a critical role in virtually all aspects of learning, reasoning, and creativity. Finaly, it may play a role in the construction of consciousness (damasio2004?)

Emotions in medieval thinking

  • emotions could be produce from something out there
  • e.g. state of melancholy: subject loses the ability to judge and reason
  • in that example emotion and cognition are interdependent
  • what happened in the body: front ventricle - phantasia after that problems with imagination and judgement in the middle ventricle
  • some modern theories about emotions staying into the trap of reductionism

References

Hunt, M. (2009). The story of psychology. Anchor Books.