Portfolio of scholars
My portfolio is comprised of the key faces of psychology. The people who made a significant contribution to the discipline and founded systems that facilitated in the uprising of psychology as a whole. I felt it was important to reflect on those who built our heritage in psychology and also devoted their lives to finding new ways and strategies to understand the human mind. I found it fascinating that these figures in psychology disagreed on several things, even who the first real founder of the discipline was. This portfolio allowed me to research the people who made my major what it is today. It is of great relevancy to go in depth when researching the history of psychology because, the science is so complex, there are several tactics that may be used to analyze one single situation or thought. The foundational figures of psychology teach us humility for our area of specialization. This project is meaningful to me because it is the capstone of what I have learned this semester in the course. Aristotle Aristotle Aristotle (340 B.C.) endeavored to put more dynamics into Platonic theory. He planned to do this by questioning the relations between form and matter in a functional sense. Aristotle was concerned with becoming, unlike Plato, who was concerned with being. He formed a theory of causes, which stated that everything is either matter or form, either probability or reality. Aristotle considered form to be embedded in matter so this did not make the two disconnected. For example, a copper vase, copper is matter (material cause), with a number of possibilities; the vase itself is form (formal cause), the reality. It is the shape or form of one of the possibilities of copper. Development (orderly and last or final causes) is the practice of the process by which matter turns into or becomes form and every form the matter for the higher form that is to come. God is the pure genuine reality, the only form that lacks matter, the only being without border or limits. Aristotle was also incorporated Gestalt theory in his conception of entelechy, the actual form or pattern in which mental activity occurs. Aristotle was the first to make a differentiation between sensation and perception. He deemed sensation as the motion of surface objects stimulated by the pneuma, forming a path from the sense organ and the heart, and perception as “common sense” role of the heart which synthesizes he sensory elements into units. He introduced empiricism in science, the proposition of association, and the principle of catharsis. After Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C., and after the death of Alexander the Great, the decline in Greek political power diminished. Soon these Greek thoughts of intellect were turned into morality and ethics. Rene Descartes Rene Descartes This French philosopher was born on 3/31/1596 a died on 2/11/1650. He was one of the most momentous thinkers in human history an is sometimes referred to as the founder of modern philosophy.