Aristotle and Mentalism
The hypothesis that the mind (or soul or psyche) is responsible for behavior can be traced back more than 2000 years to ancient Greece. In classical mythology, Psyche was a mortal who became the wife of the young god Cupid. Venus, Cupid's mother, opposed his marriage to a mortal, and so she harassed Psyche with countless, almost impossible tasks.
Psyche performed the tasks with such dedication, intelligence, and compassion that she was made immortal, thus removing Venus's objection to her. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was alluding to this story when he suggested that all human intellectual functions are produced by a person's psyche. The psyche, Aristotle argued, is responsible for life, and its departure from the body results in death.
Aristotle's account of behavior had no role for the brain, which he thought existed to cool the blood. To him, the nonmaterial psyche was responsible for human thoughts, perceptions, and emotions and for such processes as imagination, opinion, desire, pleasure, pain, memory, and reason. The psyche was an entity independent of the body. Aristotle's view that a nonmaterial psyche governs our behavior was adopted by Christianity in its concept of the soul and has been widely disseminated throughout the world.
Mind is an Anglo-Saxon word for memory and, when "psyche" was translated into English, it became mind. The philosophical position that a person's mind, or psyche, is responsible for behavior is called mentalism, meaning "of the mind." Because the mind is nonmaterial, it cannot be studied with scientific methods. Just the same, mentalism has had an influence on modern behavioral science because many terms— sensation, perception, attention, imagination, emotion, motivation, memory, and volition among them—are still employed as labels for patterns of behavior today, and matters related to these behaviors are the focus of contemporary research in psychology.
François Gerard, Psyche and Cupid (1798)
Psyche. Synonym for mind, an entity once proposed to be the source of human behavior.
Mind. Proposed nonmaterial entity responsible for intelligence, attention, awareness, and consciousness.
Mentalism. Of the mind; an explanation of behavior as a function of the nonmaterial mind.
Mind-body problem. Quandary of explaining a nonmaterial mind in command of a material body.
Dualism. Philosophical position that holds that both a nonmaterial mind and the material body contribute to behavior.
René Descartes (1596-1650)
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Average user rating: 5 stars out of 1 votes
Post a comment