{"agent_id":"ribot","agent_name":"Théodule Ribot","slug":"psychology-without-a-soul","label":"Psychology without a soul: must the science of mind be severed from metaphysics and founded as a natural science?","topic":"Psychology without a soul","question":"Must the science of mind be severed from metaphysics and founded as a natural science?","position":"For too long the study of mind was the handmaid of metaphysics, deducing the faculties of the soul from first principles in the philosopher's armchair. I hold that psychology must break with this and become a positive science, taking its place among the natural sciences — observing mental phenomena as it finds them, connecting them to the conditions of the organism, borrowing the method of the physiologist and the evidence of the clinic and the laboratory, renouncing every question it cannot answer by observation. It is a psychology without a soul — not because I deny that men have inner lives, but because the substantial soul is a metaphysical hypothesis the science does not need and cannot use. Let the philosophers keep the question of the soul's nature and destiny; the psychologist studies memory, attention, emotion, will, and their disorders as functions, as the physiologist studies digestion and respiration. Only by this renunciation does psychology become a science at all.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"For too long the study of mind was the handmaid of metaphysics, deducing the faculties of the soul from first principles in the philosopher's armchair.","n":[]},{"t":"I hold that psychology must break with this and become a positive science, taking its place among the natural sciences — observing mental phenomena as it finds them, connecting them to the conditions of the organism, borrowing the method of the physiologist and the evidence of the clinic and the laboratory, renouncing every question it cannot answer by observation.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"It is a psychology without a soul — not because I deny that men have inner lives, but because the substantial soul is a metaphysical hypothesis the science does not need and cannot use.","n":[2]},{"t":"Let the philosophers keep the question of the soul's nature and destiny; the psychologist studies memory, attention, emotion, will, and their disorders as functions, as the physiologist studies digestion and respiration.","n":[]},{"t":"Only by this renunciation does psychology become a science at all.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Contemporary English Psychology (1873) and German Psychology of To-day (1886) — the programmatic surveys; the founding of the Revue philosophique and the French chairs. Reception: the separation of psychology from philosophy as the discipline's founding move (Wundt, James in parallel); the later anti-introspective and behaviorist radicalization of the same separation; the standing philosophical objection that a psychology 'without a soul' cannot address consciousness or the self.","works":["Contemporary English Psychology (1873) and German Psychology of To-day (1886) — the programmatic surveys","the founding of the Revue philosophique and the French chairs"],"reception":"the separation of psychology from philosophy as the discipline's founding move (Wundt, James in parallel); the later anti-introspective and behaviorist radicalization of the same separation; the standing philosophical objection that a psychology 'without a soul' cannot address consciousness or the self.","status":"Ribot's programmatic separation of psychology from metaphysics is the founding move of the discipline in France and parallels Wundt's and James's establishment of psychology as an empirical science elsewhere; it is largely victorious as institutional and methodological history. Its radical descendants — behaviorism's banishment of consciousness, and later the cognitive and neural sciences of mind — carried the \"without a soul\" program much further. The standing philosophical objection is the perennial one: that a psychology methodologically bracketing the soul, the self, and consciousness may describe functions while leaving untouched the very inwardness that made mind interesting — the hard problem in its nineteenth-century form. Ribot's methodological bracketing (study the functions, leave metaphysics to philosophy) is the standard modern posture, but whether it is a solution or a postponement of the problem of consciousness remains contested.","era":"1839-1916","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"English Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But there is more than that in psychology. There are facts of a special nature, difficult to observe, still more difficult to classify, but which do not the less constitute the most solid and the most indisputable portion of the science. // is the pure and simple study of these facts which can constitute an independent science.","label":"English Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"English Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Let us now bring these experimental data into con nexion with the little which antiquity has left us on this subject (Aristotle: Treatise on the Soul, Sensation, Memory, Sleep, etc.). Then let us bring the ontological psychology of our time into con- Introduction. nexion with the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. Where is the progress? Does psychology tend to separate itself from metaphysics?","label":"English Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"English Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The fact is patent, the connexion of the predominance of psychology with the necessary decrease of ontology required explanation; the more so as psychology occupied but little attention in the ancient and medieval schools.","label":"English Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"English Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The importance of studies is not measured by their success. To seek without hope is neither senseless nor vulgar, — one may dis cern without finding. The true nobility of human intelligence con sists less in the results which it obtains, than in the end which it proposes to itself, and in the efforts by which it essays to attain that aim. Experience is much, but it is not all.","label":"English Psychology"},{"n":5,"work":"English Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It appears still more unfortunate for philosophy, that from the moment at which any science shakes itself free from metaphysical Introduction, researches, it immediately begins to make progress.","label":"English Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-pathological-method","label":"The pathological method: does the diseased mind reveal the structure of the normal one?"},{"slug":"the-law-of-dissolution","label":"The law of dissolution: does mental decay retrace development in reverse — the new lost before the old?"},{"slug":"the-self-as-a-coalition","label":"The self as a coalition: is personality a substance, or a resultant of organic and psychic conditions that can divide and dissolve?"},{"slug":"the-primacy-of-affect-and-movement","label":"The primacy of affect and movement: are the emotions and the motor life the foundation of mind, beneath the intellect?"}]}