The sciences of the soul : the early modern origins of psychology

Resource Information

The work The sciences of the soul : the early modern origins of psychology represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Swedenborg Library, Bryn Athyn College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The sciences of the soul : the early modern origins of psychology

Title remainder

the early modern origins of psychology

Statement of responsibility

Fernando Vidal ; translated by Saskia Brown

Creator

• Vidal, Fernando

Contributor

• Brown, Saskia

Subject

• 16th-18th centuries.
• 1700-1799
• History
• Psychology
• Psychology -- History
• Soul
• Soul
• Psychology -- History -- 18th century

Genre

• History

Language

• eng
• fre
• eng

Summary

The Sciences of the Soul" is the first attempt to explain the development of the disciplinary conception of psychology from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Fernando Vidal traces this development through university courses and textbooks, encyclopedias, and nonacademic books, as well as through various histories of psychology. Vidal reveals that psychology existed before the eighteenth century essentially as a "physics of the soul", and it belonged as much to natural philosophy as to Christian anthropology. It remained so until the eighteenth century, when the "science of the soul" became the "science of the mind". Vidal demonstrates that this Enlightenment refashioning took place within a Christian framework, and he explores how the preservation of the Christian idea of the soul was essential to the development of the science. Not only were most psychologists convinced that an empirical science of the soul was compatible with Christian faith; their perception that psychology preserved the soul also helped to elevate its rank as an empirical science. Broad-ranging and impeccably researched, this book will be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe. -- Book cover

Member of

• Sciences de l'âme

Cataloging source

ICU/DLC

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

BF101

LC item number

.V5313 2011

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography