International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
must coördinate mathematics with logic and not with physics.
As to the subdivision of philosophy, it is most essential for us to
point to the negative fact that of course psychology cannot have a place
in the philosophical department, as part of the Normative Division.
There is perhaps no science whose position in the system of knowledge
offers so many methodological difficulties as psychology. Historical
tradition of course links it with philosophy; throughout a great part of
its present endeavors it is, on the other hand, linked with physiology.
Thus we find it sometimes coördinated with logic and ethics, and
sometimes, especially in the classical positivistic systems, coördinated
with the sciences of the organic functions. We have seen why a really
logical treatment has to disregard those historical and practical
relations and has to separate the psychological sciences from the
philosophical and the biological sciences. Yet even this does not
complete the list of problems which must be settled, inasmuch as modern
thinkers have frequently insisted that psychology itself allows a
twofold aspect. We can have a psychology which describes and explains
the mental life by analyzing it into its elements and by connecting
these elements through causality. But there may be another psychology
which treats inner life in that immediate unity in which we experience
it and seeks to interpret it as the free function of personality. This
latter kind of psychology has been called voluntaristic psychology as
against the phenomenalistic psychology which seeks description and
explanation. Such voluntaristic psychology would clearly belong again to
a different division. It would be a theory of individual life as a
function of will, and would thus be introductory to the historical
sciences and to the normative sciences too. Yet we left out this
teleological psychology from our programme, as such a science is as yet
a programme only. Wherever an effort is made to realize it, it becomes
an odd mixture of an inconsistent phenomenalistic psychology on the one
side, and philosophy of history, logic, ethics, and æsthetics on the
other side. The only science which really has a right to call itself
psychology is the one which seeks to describe and to explain inner life
and treats it therefore as a system of psychical objects, that is, as
contents of consciousness, that is, as phenomena. Psychology belongs,
then, in the general division of psychical sciences as over against
physical sciences, and both deal with objects as over against philosophy
and history, which deal with subjects of will.
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