Pre-Socratic Greeks
Some landmarks from the Golden age of Greece and the East
Before Upanishads
1000 B.C.
(Philosophical texts from India)582-507 B.C. Pythagoras
563-483 B.C. Buddha
551-479 B.C. Confucious
469-399 B.C. Socrates
427-347 B.C. Plato
384-322 B.C. Aristotle
From Ancient Greece:
Some ideas relevant to psychology
Thales (fl. 585 B.C.)
-Things made of a single substance - Water
-Ideas of "physis," the single substance in the universe
-Naturalism
-The critical method
Pythagoras (fl. 530 B.C.)
-Soul/body distinction
-importance of mathematical accounts
"everything has its number"
The origin of two rival viewpoints:
Emphasis on
Change vs. Permanence
Heraclitus Parmenides
(540-475 B.C.) (540-470 B.C.)
You cannot step Change is in
the same river twice appearance not in reality
Implication for Psychology
Becoming Being
study change study enduring patterns
(development) (patterns or traits or identity)
Values Values
Change: permanence
Self Actualization self-realization
Aristotle, Hume Plato, Kant
Democritus (460-370 B.C.)
- molecularism: things are made of atoms
- material monism:
denial of soul; mind made of highly mobile "fire atoms"
- Naturalism: no gods believed in
- Determinism as cause of all action
Copy theory of knowledge
atoms emanating from objects enter body through senses & create eidola (copies of objects) through highly mobile fire atoms in the brain
Note: > Confluence of these particular ideas
> similarity of these ideas with contemporary views
Protagoras (~490-420 B.C.):
"Man is the measure of all things; of those that they are they are; and of those that they are not they are not."
Justice and Laws need to relative to the circumstances that people find themselves in, and others cannot judge and measure what is foreign to them.
Early scholar of the Humanities (Human Science) perspective. No Universals only man-made relative truths.