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ISBN: PB: 9780226710365

ISBN: HB: 9780226855868

University of Chicago Press

March 2020

432 pp.

23x15 cm

8 tables, 3 halftones, 14 line illus.

PB:
£32,00
QTY:
HB:
£56,00
QTY:

Categories:

Sciences of the Soul

The Early Modern Origins of Psychology

"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.

Reviews

"'The Sciences of the Soul' is clearly the product of a substantial period of sustained research. It will set the framework for research in the history of psychology in the period from 1600 to 1850 for many years to come and will also entail changes in the usual discussion of the 'origin' of psychology as a discipline" – Gary Hatfield, author of "Perception & Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology"

"Firm scholarly conviction has it that psychology began as a scientific discipline only in the last part of the nineteenth century. Fernando Vidal thoroughly overturns that assumption in his compelling historical reconstruction of the development of psychology from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He shows how the concept of soul, initially caught in scholastic rationalism, underwent an empirical transformation from the form of the body to the activities of the mind, a mind whose intense thought had been compared to 'a ligature applied to all of the nerves'. By contrast, Vidal's work – linguistically adroit, amazingly comprehensive, and scholarly satisfying – releases the nervous fluids to invigorate the mind of the reader. No other history comes close to his exquisite accomplishment" – Robert J. Richards, University of Chicago

"This is a very impressive book, a work of high and original scholarship. Vidal follows the history of the concept of 'psychologia' from the sixteenth century and argues that even without there being already a 'discipline', one can talk of a sound psychological thinking from that time on. Vidal demonstrates how key ideas of eighteenth-century 'psychology' – the concept of the esprit humain; the connections between anthropology, psychology, and moral sciences; and the notion of perfectibility – found their beginnings in the sixteenth century. 'The Sciences of the Soul' will be the standard reference work on early modern 'psychology' for specialists in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of science" – Martin Mulsow, University of Erfurt