#2: Philosophy

The earliest evidence of psychology as a field of thought can probably be traced back to the classical era when one of the main arguments that philosophers were conflicted with was the concept of being vs. becoming.  Those who believed in the concept ‘being’ felt that there were certain eternal truths about society that cannot be changed whereas those supporting the concept ‘becoming’ felt that the universe is perpetually changing as is the human race.  One famous philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (500B.C.E) proclaimed the famous quote “no one ever steps in the same river twice,” supporting the concept of ‘becoming.’ From this philosophy, many other scholars were realizing permanence is only a temporary thing and as this new pool of thought came into being, people saw that there is a ‘Way of Seeming’ as opposed to a ‘Way of Truth’ as proclaimed by Parmenides of Elea (475B.C.E).  This notion perpetuated into the generations of Socrates and Aristotle as philosophers began to see that the human mind is ‘becoming’ rather than it being a stable object.

Plato first spawned the thought that the object of knowledge lasts forever and cannot be changed and that these objects can be considered ‘knowledge of form’ or of things that are imperfect leading to him to believe that humans themselves are imperfect forms of truth.  Plato created this metaphor that helps describe life as being divided among the intelligible world and world of appearances as illustrated in the diagram.  While primitive, it did give a general basis for future branches of psychology.  In future blog posts, you will learn more about how the first psychological experiments began and how people began to see that humans are far from this thought of ‘forms of truth’ and were in fact quite imperfect as disorders in human personalities and mind sets were noticed.

Works Cited

Leahey, Thomas H. A History of Psychology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Print.