Question

Discuss the major contributions of one philosopher and outline his or her major contributions to the field.

Discuss the major contributions of one physiologist and outline his or her major contributions to the field.

Discuss how philosophy and physiology have influenced psychology.

Provide examples of how the early theorists you selected would assess the case study example you created in this week’s discussion topic.

2 to 3 pages

Answer 1

Discuss the major contributions of one philosopher and outline his or her major contributions to the field.

Aristotle is among the most important and influential philosophers, thinkers and teachers in human history, often considered to be a father of Western Philosophy. Born in the northern part of ancient Greece, his writings and ideas on metaphysics, ethics, knowledge, and methodological inquiry are at the very root of human thought.

His major contributions are:

• He asserted the use of logic as a method of argument and offered the basic methodological template for analytical discourse;
• He sspoused the understanding that knowledge is built from the study of things that happen in the world, and that some knowledge is universal — a prevailing set of ideas throughout Western Civilization thereafter;
• He defined metaphysics as “the knowledge of immaterial being,” and used this framework to examine the relationship between substance (a combination of matter and form) and essence, from which he devises that man is comprised from a unity of the two.

Discuss the major contributions of one physiologist and outline his or her major contributions to the field.

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex.

His major contributions are:

In a now-classic experiment, he trained a hungry dog to salivate at the sound of a metronome or buzzer, which was previously associated with the sight of food. He developed a similar conceptual approach, emphasizing the importance of conditioning, in his pioneering studies relating human behaviour to the nervous system. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for his work on digestive secretions.

Discuss how philosophy and physiology have influenced psychology.

Psychology emerged as a discipline from the thoughts and ideas of philosophy and findings of physiology.

Psychology did not emerge as a separate discipline until the late 1800s. During the 17th-century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the idea of dualism, which asserted that the mind and body were two entities that interact to form the human experience.Thus, Psychology emerged from methods of early philosophers such as observation and logic and today psychologists utilize scientific methodologies to study and draw conclusions about human thought and behavior.

Physiology also contributed to psychology’s eventual emergence as a scientific discipline. Early physiological research on the brain and behavior had a dramatic impact on psychology, ultimately contributing to applying scientific methodologies to the study of human thought and behavior.