This study investigates Descartes' contribution to physiological psychology, limited to a consideration of his substitution of physical for psychical causes of sensation and lower-level cognitive functions. The focus of the study is on the Renaissance "faculty psychology" which preceded Descartes, and upon Descartes' development of a mechanical analogue of man which made possible the transition from psychistic to non-psychistic investigation of the human mind. / Chapter I, "The Background and Development of Renaissance Faculty Psychology," develops the history of psychological thought from Galen to Vesalius so that the reader may acquire a sensitivity to the proper intellectual context of Descartes' work. Chapter II, "The Rejection of Vitalism in the 17th Century," traces the replacement of physical for psychical interpretations of life phenomena as the environment in which Descartes' thoughts flourished. / The body of the study is contained in Chapters III and IV. Chapter III, "Descartes' Physiological Psychology," investigates Descartes' dualist ontology in two of his works, Treatise of Man and Passions of the Soul, as a means of developing an understanding of the philosopher's contribution to physiological psychology. / Chapter IV explores Descartes' use of a special kind of model, a scaled theoretical analogue, in the Treatise of Man. It is by means of this model that Descartes becomes the first to apply the "mechanical hypothesis" to man. / Descartes' reduction of man to an efficient machine--at least in a theoretical model--and the value of this approach in the subsequent physical investigation of mind is discussed in Chapter V, "The Cartesian Influence on Subsequent Development in Physiological Psychology." / In the Conclusion of the study, the value of Descartes' mechanical model of man is seen to lie in its ability to offer future researchers the opportunity to prove or disprove the assumptions of the model--and innumerable subsequent ones--by putting them to the test of experiment. Descartes is, therefore, credited as being the first to remove the mechanical functioning of the body--even the lower-level cognitive functions of the mind--from the realm of the soul, and ground them firmly in the soil of empiricism. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-06, Section: B, page: 2032. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74862 |
| Contributors | ELLIS, CLYDE ARTHUR, JR., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 181 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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