THE ‘LONG PAST’ OF PSYCHOLOGY

It is not uncommon for histories of psychology to begin by quoting Hermann Ebbinghaus's dictum that psychology has ‘a short history but a long past’. This implies that until psychology became a science and acquired a history, it was uneventful. It suggests the long persistence of a stable paradigm, and in some respects it is true. It is indeed the case that from antiquity up to the nineteenth century most European philosophy of mind derived directly or indirectly from Aristotle's De anima. The underlying model of mind is a group of distinct faculties with a physiological basis, each located in a separate organ and each defined by its function. One can find evidence for this model as far back as the Homeric poems. Given systematic and philosophical form by Aristotle, it became the standard model of mind and lasted well into the modern period. For instance, the belief, explicitly held by Aristotle and implicit in Homer, that humans share with animals all of their psychic faculties except for reason would have been accepted by most thinkers of the eighteenth century.

The aim of this chapter is to identify the key features of psychology's long past. This will involve a brief summary of Aristotle's De anima, followed by an account of the fate of the much less influential Platonic tradition.