Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean?  It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection.  For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition.   Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation.  One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensio...

A few words today about psychology before James, or Freud, or Pavlov. Before any of them there was Wilhelm Wundt, who may have been the first scholar writing about the human mind to call HIMSELF a "psychologist".  A few words about the timeline. Herbert Spencer wrote his PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY in two volumes, which appeared a decade apart, in 1870 and 1880. Wundt's most important works in the field were published in 1873-74 and 1881. James published his brilliant two volume Principles in 1890. Freud's breakthrough began with Studies in Hysteria and Three Essays, in the 1890s and after the turn of the century, respectively.  Pavlov published his lectures on the nervous system, which included his famous observations of salivating dogs,  in 1897.   One gets the impression, then, of Wundt (and perhaps Herbert Spencer in his psychological writings) as constituting the Old Guard in psychology, in the days just before the field was about to explode in a variety ...