Review article

Psychologia – the birth of a new scientific context

Riccardo Luccio ; Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste

Abstract

The use of the term soul was banned from the psychological vocabulary, at least since Angell’s famous interdict in 1911. This paper examines the various stages of the constitution of the domain of knowledge labelled psychologia since the 16th century, when the term psychologia was coined by the Dalmatian humanist Marko Marulić (Krstić, 1964). His treatise on the subject was unfortunately lost and the term was possibly “reinvented” in the Ramist field of philosophy. The first printed occurrence was in Freigius’ (1575), Snellius’ (1596a, b), and Casmann’s (1594) work, which is where the process of refinement of the subject area began. According to Ramists, all of the soul could be studied as a part of physics, and not only its lower components, as had been considered before that. While the great scholars of the mind, like Descartes, Leibniz, or Locke, ignored the term, psychologia had a clear development in the 17th and 18th century, mainly in medicine. Subsequently, Christian Wolff (1732) introduced empirical psychology in the 18th century, which is considered the very basis of the scientific psychology.

Keywords

Psychologia; context; origin; Ramism; soul; history

Hrčak ID:

116334

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/116334

Publication date:

28.12.2013.

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