book review critical psychology history of psychology

On Hijacking Science (E. E. Gantt & R. N. Williams)

I have written a review and summary of this book on Medium. In future posts, I am planning to select specific passages from the book and explore questions regarding science, scientific communication, and scientism. This slim, engaging, and valuable book belongs in the book series, Advances in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, edited by Brent D. Slife. It consists of eight chapters by various authors, in addition to a foreword by the series Editor, a preface by…

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critical psychology history of psychology philosophical psychology philosophy of science Theoretical Psychology

Jeff Sugarman on Psychologism

In his Chapter, An Historical Turn in Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology, Jeff Sugarman (2019) begins by distinguishing three different approach to historiography (borrowing from Nikolas Rose). Among the three approaches, he introduces and adopts ‘critical history’. One of the aims of critical history is to explicate styles of reasoning that are operating in the background of scientific activities. Styles of reasoning (Alistair C. Crombie; Ian Hacking) provide conditions of possibility for research questions, methods, and…

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Descriptive Psychology history of psychology philosophical psychology William James

You Do not Stand Alone

Reflections on: Natsoulas, T. (2005). The Varieties of Religious Experience considered from the perspective of James’s account of the stream of consciousness. In R. D. Ellis & N. Newton (Eds.), Consciousness & Emotion: Agency, Conscious Choice, and Selective Perception (pp. 303-325). John Benjamins Publishing. In a brief address, published in Psychological Review in 1943, E. L. Thorndike attempts to acknowledge the contributions of William James to psychology. On the  first page of the article, he claims that the…

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book review history of psychology

Philosophical History

A review of Martin Farrell’s “Historical & Philosophical Foundations of Psychology“, Cambridge, 2014.   July 24, 2015 The brief summer course is coming to its end and it is an appropriate time to write about the book I used as the only required reading for the course. Choosing the book was not easy. When I was the teaching assistant for the course, the instructor used Thomas Leahey’s History of Psychology: From Antiquity to Modernity (7th edition), although I soon realized that there was…

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Interview with Michael Wertheimer

Michael Wertheimer is Professor Emeritus at University of Colorado Boulder. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1952. He has published hundreds of articles and is the author of several books, including “A Brief History of Psychology (5th ed.)“, and “Max Wertheimer & Gestalt Theory“. Professor Wertheimer also coedited the first four volumes of the series “Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology” (published by APA & Earlbaum). He has been president of four APA divisions (General Psychology, Teaching of…

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