The Roman Empire had preserved knowledge, but it collapsed and was overrun by Barbarians.
Access to the accumulated knowledge was preserved in Muslim libraries but these were inaccessible because the West was mostly Christian.
The Medieval Church discouraged literacy, free thought, and scientific inquiry beyond the revealed wisdom of clerics & church scholars (St. Augustine).
With the Crusades, knowledge was rediscovered.
Muslim Libraries were Rediscovered
Launched by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095, the First Crusade was the most successful. Urban gave a dramatic speech urging Christians to swarm toward Jerusalem and make it safe for Christian pilgrims by taking it away from the Muslims.
Black sea
One View of the Dark Ages
Science in the Dark Ages
Hothersall – the historian Kemp asserts there was innovation and science during the Dark Ages:
Stirrups used for the first time in war (600’s AD/CE).
A biography of Charlemagne was published (800’s).
Domesday Book (1086 survey done for King William I of England) recorded 6000 watermills in Britain.
Windmill invented in 1180 (taxed by the Vatican).
It would be odd if there were no progress at all, but this is not comparable to what was seen in Greece & Rome nor was learning cumulative.
Medieval Period
Population increased putting pressure on peasants.
14 universities were established in 12th & 13th centuries, including Oxford & Cambridge.
Civil war and wars between France, Italy & England disrupted the 14th century.
Plague (Black Death, 1348-1350) killed 1/3 of the population of Europe.
Gothic Architecture
Gothic Cathedrals are intricately designed architectural features, which date back to 1144 and possibly even earlier. The architecture used to make these magnificent buildings took a very long time and it involved many different forms of talent, and skill as well as hard to find materials.
Scenes of the Plague Years
Plague-inspired art. Images of the grim reaper originate from this time.
Psychology in the Middle Ages
Psychological questions belonged to religion.
In “Confessions,” St. Augustine (4th century) disclosed psychological emotions, thoughts, motives, memories.
God was the ultimate truth.
Knowing God was the ultimate goal of the human mind.
Truth dwells within every person – turn inward.
St. Thomas Aquinas reinterpreted Aristotle and established scholasticism – reason as a complement to faith in the search for truth.
The Renaissance (Rebirth)
The invention of movable type made printing inexpensive, permitting the spread of ideas across Europe via books, including to scholars & others.
Prescientific psychology books appeared:
Psichiologia – Marcus Marulus (1520).
Psychologia hoc est, de hominis perfectione (Psychology on the improvement of man) (1590) edited by Goeckel.
Psychologia – John Broughton (1703) in English.
No scientific study of human behavior was started.
Early Cosmology
Medieval conceptions of the firmament include a solid orb containing the planets with angels & heaven beyond it. Here, a traveler sticks his head through it.
Renaissance Science
The view of man’s place in the universe changed.
Copernicus (1543) demoted humans from a central to a peripheral position – his system was called antireligious.
Galileo (1610) confirmed his view that the Earth goes around the sun, not vice versa, as did Bruno.
Galileo also developed a method of manipulating variables while controlling other factors in expts.
Goaded by Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, the Catholic church was unreceptive to Galileo’s new theory -- Bruno was burned at the stake.
The Reformation Split the Church
Protestants:
Lutherans Anglicans Puritans
Episcopalians
Presbyterians
Methodists
Baptists
etc.
Eastern Orthodox
A Plea for Freedom of Inquiry
Galileo believed in the power of reason:
“…in questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
The next advances came from Protestant countries.
Isaac Newton revolutionized physics by developing a new optics (theory of light) and laws of physics.
Vesalius developed an anatomy of the human body.
Harvey studied the movement of the heart and the motion of blood using experimental methods.
Three Scientific Geniuses
Issac Newton (1642-1727)
Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)
William Harvey (1578-1657)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
At age 23, a dream revealed a “Spirit of Truth,” a vision of a new system of science and mathematics so he renounced idleness to search for truth.
He first combined algebra & geometry into analytic geometry, published 18 years later as “La Geometrie”.
He lived in 24 homes in 13 cities during 20 years in Spain-occupied Holland, hiding out from the Inquisition.
Queen Christina of Sweden summoned him to tutor her on “How to live happily and still not annoy God.”
He died of pneumonia 4 months later in her court.
Contributions to Philosophy
Descartes believed in applying logic rigorously to discover truth.
Descartes was a devout Catholic but he sometimes doubted the existence of God, so he was heretical.
Cogito ergo sum – I doubt, thus I think, therefore I exist.
He considered the mind different than the body.
Having different substance, different functions, bound by different laws.
The body is nothing more than a complex self-regulating machine functioning without the mind.
Ideas about the Body
Hollow tubes of minute threads contain subtle fluids (animal spirits) distilled from the blood, flowing to the senses for sensation and movement.
Reflexes operate as a hydraulic pathway between body and brain, pores are synapses.
The body is infinitely more complex than a machine designed by humans because invented by God.
Animals only have reflexes but humans can control the opening of pores to control reflex actions.
The pineal gland is where mind and body meet.
Rene Descartes
Ideas about the Ideas & Passions
Two major classes of ideas exist in the mind:
Innate ideas – inborn, time, space, motion, God.
Derived ideas – arising from experience, based on memories of past events (open pores stay open).
Passions arise from the body and cause actions.
6 primary passions (wonder, love, hate, desire, joy, sadness) – other passions are mixtures of these.
Animals do not possess minds so cannot think, be self-aware or have language – have no feelings.
Julien de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
La Mettrie published “L’homme Machine” (Man the Machine) in 1748, arguing that people are solely machines, explained through mechanistic principles.
People are motivated by hedonistic drives (pleasure, pain) not reasoning.
Degrees of thought are present in animals not just people – cognition is a continuum across organisms.
His prediction that apes can use language has been confirmed by those studying chimpanzees.
Post-Renaissance Philosophy
Empiricism – emphasized the effects of experience on a passive mind.
Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley.
Associationism – the active mind forms associations.
Hume, Hartley, James and John Stuart Mill
Nativism – the contents of the mind are influenced by its inborn structure, not just experience.
Hobbes’s views of mind were based on his social and political theories about people in groups.
He believed we are basically aggressive animals banding together for protection from other people.
The only way a group’s integrity can be protected is via a strong, centralized authority, such as a monarch.
This thinking influences current sociobiologists.
Barash (1977) says that because we cannot kill each other without weapons, we have no biological inhibition against aggression like animals do, leading to war, etc.
Political ideas – people have inalienable rights to personal liberty, equality before the law, religious equality – protected by checks & balances & overthrow
Philosophy of education – people are born good and equal in potential, making education crucial.
Access to education should be available to all children.
Locke’s Views on Education
Locke denied existence of innate tendencies, dispositions or fears in children.
The only things we innately fear are loss of pleasure and pain. We avoid whatever has these consequences.
He proposed that children dislike reading because of punishments associated with teaching them.
Locke advanced ideas about the acquisition and treatment of fears similar to Watson, Mary Cover Jones and Wolpe (systematic desensitization).
Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690)
This work was the beginning of British Empiricism.
Locke sought a set of laws for the human mind, like Newton’s principles of physics.
Locke’s system is atomistic and reductionistic.
Basic elements of mind are ideas.
Ideas come from experience (Locke rejected Descartes).
The “blank slate, page of paper, tablet” comes from Aristotle, but characterized empiricism.
Ideas have two sources: sensation & reflection.
Locke & Ideas (Cont.)
Sensations can be illusory or misleading.
Ideas are either simple or complex. Simples ideas form a complex idea in several ways:
By combining several simple ideas into a single one.
By seeing the relation between two simple ideas.
By separating simple ideas from other ideas that go with them – the process of abstraction.
Locke’s idea about combination of ideas is analogous to a chemical compound (from Boyle).
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Wrote three essays that radically extended Locke’s philosophy into subject idealism (immaterialism).
Berkeley argued that because all knowledge of the world comes from experience, the very existence of the external world depends on perception.
Matter exists because it is perceived – matter does not exist without a mind.
The permanence of the world is thus proof of God’s existence.
His book on vision was better regarded in his time.
