A History of Thinking About the Mind

A Fall 2024 Emeritus Society Course

Location:

UNCG School of Education Building, Spring Garden Street, Greensboro, NC, USA

Cost:

$ 100.00 per person

Duration:

1h 30min

About this experience

Wednesday, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm 
September 18 - October 16 
UNCG School of Education Building 

Questions about what the mind is and how it works go back to the earliest beginnings of philosophical inquiry. After two millennia of philosophical speculation about the mind, scientific tools for its investigation began to be developed in the late 19th century, and psychology began to develop its identity as a science. Attempts to assign psychological functions to specific regions of the brain had begun in medieval times and subsequent advances in anatomy and physiology broadened the understanding of the relationship between brain and mind. The rise of Darwinian evolutionary theory after 1859 provided another biological perspective for understanding the mind and behavior and highlighted the question of the relationship between human and animal psychology. In 1913, John B. Watson published his “behaviorist manifesto,” which argued that psychology should abandon the mind as a subject of scientific inquiry and focus instead on behavior and its control by the environment. Behaviorism dominated psychology, especially in America, for the first half of the 20th century, after which the rise of cognitive psychology reinstated the mind as a proper subject for investigation.

  1. Philosophical Roots of Psychology from Plato to Kant
  2. The Emergence of Scientific Psychology
  3. Understanding the Mind in Terms of the Brain
  4. The Evolution of Mind and Behavior
  5. How Psychology Lost Its Mind . . . and Got It Back Again

 

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Tim Johnston is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Emeritus Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at UNCG, where he was a faculty member for 41 years. He has taught classes in the history of psychology, animal behavior, general psychology, and the history of evolution. His current research and scholarship address several topics in the history of behavioral sciences.