Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

Descartes (see Box 4.1) is often thought of as the inaugurator of modern (as opposed to ancient or mediaeval) philosophy. Any chopping up of intellectual history into distinct periods is, of course, going to be somewhat arbitrary but Descartes does nevertheless represent an appropriate starting point for our discussion of the philosophy of mind, not only because of his canonical status as the starting point of modern philosophy, but because of the immense influence of his ideas on later developments in psychology and philosophy.

The roots of many contemporary debates, from the question of innate linguistic representations to the relationship between the mind and the body, are to be found in Descartes, and many psychologists and philosophers still define themselves explicitly as aligned with or – more commonly – in explicit opposition to Descartes’ ideas. For this reason, the intellectual framework within which much psychological thinking proceeds is still largely Cartesian, even if the thinking in question is only an attempt to get away from the Cartesian framework. Descartes is still the reference point relative to which many psychologists and philosophers still define their stances. Nowhere is this truer than in the context of the relationship between mind and body. Descartes effectively changed the intellectual landscape so that nearly all discussions of the mind–body problem today will start with an account of Descartes’ own thoughts on the topic. And this is with good reason – the mind–body problem in its modern guise really did start with Descartes. The body and the mind were, thought Descartes, completely different substances: whereas the body was made out of the same matter as the rest of the physical world, the mind, argued Descartes, was a non-physical substance. Explaining how two such different entities could possibly interact with one another is the nub of the mind–body problem, and the difficulty of providing such an explanation has, as we shall see, provoked many thinkers to argue that there must be something fundamentally wrong with the idea that body and mind are different substances.