Psychology, theories of

By Wetherick, N.E.

The object of study in psychology is the experience and behaviour of organisms, particularly human organisms. Psychology resembles the other sciences in employing methods appropriate to material phenomena ...

Hägerström, Axel Anders Theodor (1868–1939)

By Dahlquist, Thorild; Henschen-Dahlquist, Ann-Mari

Hägerström was professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, from 1911 until 1933, and together with his pupil Adolf Phalén founded the Uppsala school of conceptual analysis. He ...

Social sciences, philosophy of

By Ruben, David-Hillel

Although some of the topics and issues treated in the philosophy of social science are as old as philosophy itself (for example, the contrast between nature and convention ...

Vision

Why do things look to us as they do? This question, formulated by psychologist Kurt Koffka, identifies the main problematic of vision science. Consider looking at a black ...

Personal identity

By Schechtman, Marya

The ‘problem of personal identity’ as it is usually construed in philosophy is a special case of more general questions about the identity of objects over time. There ...

Personal identity

While many areas of philosophy are concerned with issues of personal identity, the investigation most usually referred to as ‘the problem of personal identity’ within analytic philosophy centers ...

Rationality, practical

By Hampton, Jean

Whereas theoretical reason is that form of reason that is authoritative over belief, practical reason is that form of reason that applies, in some way, to action: by ...

Disjunctivism

By Fish, William

The disjunctivist claims that the mental states involved in a case of successful – “veridical” – perception of an object differ from those involved in a hallucinatory experience ...

Psychology, personal and subpersonal

By Drayson, Zoe

Explanations in psychology are described as personal when they attribute psychological phenomena to the person, as when we attribute beliefs and thought processes to each other, for example. ...

Economics, philosophy of

By Hausman, Daniel

People have thought about economics for as long as they have thought about how to manage their households, indeed Aristotle compared the study of the economic affairs of ...

Mind, philosophy of

By Jackson, Frank; Rey, Georges

‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour ...

Introspection, psychology of

Introspection is the process of directly examining one’s own conscious mental states and processes. Since the seventeenth century, there has been considerable disagreement on the scope, nature and ...

Attention

By Mole, Christopher

Attention is related to several puzzling phenomena. But its nature, and role in their explanation, is contentious. ...

Russian philosophy of law

By Walicki, Andrzej

Russian thought is rarely associated with philosophy of law. The intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Russia are known rather for their uncompromising critique of legalism, passing sometimes into a genuine ...

Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801–87)

By Robinson, Daniel N.

Fechner was a pioneer in experimental psychology and the founder of psychophysics, the speciality within psychology devoted to quantitative studies of perception. In his foundational Elemente der Psychophysik ...

Attention

Attention is a contentious topic, partly because the nature of attention itself is disputed, and partly because there are open questions about attention’s explanatory relations to several other ...

Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961)

By Hogenson, George B.

Jung was among the leaders in the development of depth psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. An early follower of Sigmund Freud, he broke with the ...

Ferguson, Adam (1723–1815)

By Kettler, David

Rarely mentioned by philosophers except as companion of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson contributed a political consciousness to the moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. In An Essay ...

Content: wide and narrow

Debates about wide and narrow content concern the representational contents of psychological states such as beliefs and desires. In the mid-twentieth century, it became common among philosophers to ...

Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838–1917)

By Chisholm, Roderick M.; Simons, Peter

Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and ...

Methodological individualism

By Segal, Gabriel

Methodological individualism (MI) is the thesis that certain psychological properties are intrinsic properties, such as ‘being made out of iron’, rather than externally relational properties, such ...

Scientific imagination

The scientific imagination is a cognitive ability that is crucial to a number of scientific practices aimed at producing new knowledge of contingent features of the world. Philosophers ...

Wundt, Wilhelm (1832–1920)

By Brockmeier, Jens

The German philosopher, psychologist and physician Wilhelm Wundt founded the world’s first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 – at a time when psychology was still generally regarded ...

James, William (1842–1910)

By Putnam, Ruth Anna

The American William James was motivated to philosophize by a desire to provide a philosophical ground for moral action. Moral effort presupposes that one has free will, that ...