Philosophy of psychology

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The philosophy of psychology relates to the philosophical prerequisites of psychology and thematizes the interrelationship between the two areas. It serves to critically examine the principles that determine and influence psychological action.

Like the (older) philosophy of mind , the philosophy of psychology seeks to uncover motifs that make an analysis of human will, feeling and action difficult or impossible.

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If philosophy is generally viewed as the reflection of certain things that are taken for granted, epistemological , ethical , religious and anthropological approaches can play a role based on the four Kantian questions .

A complex that goes back to René Descartes , touches on a number of philosophical disciplines and is dealt with here in particular, is the mind-body problem .

development

The different approaches of a philosophy of psychology can be explained as a reaction to the fact that, within psychology, certain self-evident issues were problematized, which belonged to the principles of psychological action. Since psychology was established and institutionalized, the formation of psychological knowledge has been questioned again and again and has therefore also become the subject of philosophical considerations.

Whether psychology can be practiced as an objectively explanatory natural science or rather as a dialogical, understanding and interpretive humanities or cultural science , are questions that were discussed here.

Leading to a dualism leading distinction between "physical" phenomena on one side and "intellectual", "mental" on the other side resulted in science soon became an "ontological dualism". The connection between the physical or physical sphere and the "spiritual" led in the course of time to different explanatory models. Attempts at finding a solution are psychophysical parallelism and epiphenomenalism on the one hand and variants of a materialism - including behaviorism, for example - on the other.

The conceptual analytical approach within the philosophy of the mind, which goes back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and seeks to expose the body-soul problem as a pseudo problem, should also be mentioned.

Wittgenstein dealt with the concept of imagination in his critical-diagnostic investigations into the philosophy of psychology . In doing so, he attacked the model that imagining was an internal event in which private objects were "perceived" in the inner world. In order to understand what ideas are, it is rather necessary to examine the rules of the language game with the word "imagine". One should not ask what representations are or what happens when one imagines something, but rather how the word “representation” is used.

Individual evidence

  1. Günter Aschenbach, Philosophy of Psychology , in: Handwortbuch Psychologie, ed. Roland Asanger and Gerd Wenninger, Beltz, Psychologie Verlags Union, Weinheim 1999, p. 551
  2. Günter Aschenbach, Philosophy of Psychology , in: Handwortbuch Psychologie, ed. Roland Asanger and Gerd Wenninger, Beltz, Psychologie Verlags Union, Weinheim 1999, p. 553
  3. Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, Presentation , Vol. 11, p. 1244