Aristotelian-Thomistic Teleological Behavioral Psychology Reconstruction
Journal Title: Studia Gilsoniana - Year 2018, Vol 7, Issue 2
Abstract
The article is based on Robert Kugelmann’s work, Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries. It examines the development of Catholic psychology as a history of defining boundaries within scientific empirical psychology from 1829 to the present. The author divides the historical period into three periods: One: Neoscholastic Rational Psychology (1829–1965); Two: After Vatican II Psychology (1965 to present); and Three: An Emerging Thomistic Rational Teleological Behavioral Psychology. The essay examines the development of Neoscholastic rational psychology as a response to modernist experimental psychology. The neoscholastic movement approached the new discipline of empirical, as opposed to rational, psychology with the firm conviction in the formulation of a meta-psychology, based on a Thomistic metaphysics that would allow for an eventual synthesis of rational and empirical psychology. However, a synthesis with empirical psychology never came to realization, mainly over the issue of the faculties of the soul as foundational for a science of human behavior. The author argues that, even to the present day, the best approach to entering into a trading zone (transitional genus) with the principles and methods of scientific psychology is by avoiding all expressions of past, present, and future introspective psychology and brain mentalism, and turning to a synthesis with teleological behavioral principles and Aristotelian-Thomistic faculties of the soul psychology.
Authors and Affiliations
A. William McVey
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP298931
- DOI 10.26385/SG.070210
- Views 183
- Downloads 0
LO BELLO Y LA BELLEZA EN EL COMENTARIO TOMASINO AL DE DIVINIS NOMINIBUS
While St. Thomas Aquinas has not written any separate treaty on beauty, the theme of beauty regularly appears in his writing from its very beginning as that which corresponds with the Platonic doctrine presented by Diony...
Étienne Gilson’s Influence on Philosophy in Poland
The article consists of the following parts: 1. Spreading É. Gilson’s thought by professor S. Świeżawski: (a) Achievements, (b) The history of contacts as a proof of the acceptance of É. Gilson’s thought. 2. Spreading É....
FORMS AND PREDICATION RECONSIDERED
The central questions addressed in this paper are: (1) how are forms related to predication? And (2) what role do forms and predication play in the discovery and articulation of truth? The first section of the paper prov...
ON “THE CONTINGENCY OF OUR OWN BEATITUDE.” SOME REFLECTIONS ON GILSON’S “THE FUTURE OF AUGUSTINIAN METAPHYSICS”
Inspired by selected passages from Wendell Berry’s story “A Place in Time,” the article discusses Étienne Gilson’s essay “The Future of Augus-tinian Metaphysics.” Augustinian metaphysics, according to Gilson, begins with...
THE MISSING PERSON IN CATHOLIC SPIRITUALITY
Peter Redpath and Gabriel Marcel warn that the West is engulfed in a crisis. From their various philosophical perspectives, they identify the source of the crisis as a distortion of traditional Christian metaphysics of t...