Hergenhahn’s An Introduction to the History

of Psychology
Eighth Edition

Chapter 3
Rome and the Middle
Ages

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Learning Objectives (1 of 3)

After reading and discussing Chapter 3, students

should:
• Be familiar with the philosophy of skepticism.
• Be familiar with the practice of cynicism.
• Be acquainted with responses to the skeptic’s and
cynic’s claims.
• Understand the Neoplatonic philosophy and its
impact on Judeo-Christian religion.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Learning Objectives (2 of 3)

• Be acquainted with the influence of the various

philosophies/religious views on the peoples of the
Roman Empire.
• Understand Augustine’s ideas about and
contributions to the development of
philosophy/religions and views of the world.
• Be familiar with the state of religion and intellectual
progress in the Middle Ages.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Learning Objectives (3 of 3)

• Understand Islamic and Jewish influences on the

development of Western thought.
• Understand the process of the reconciliation of faith
and reason.
• Be acquainted with the influence of William of
Occam on method of science
• Be familiar with the state of philosophy/science and
religion prior to the advent of the Renaissance.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Skepticism

• Pyrrho of Elis was the founder

• Suspension of belief in anything
• Main target was dogmatists
• Skepticism proposed that arguments for and against any
philosophical doctrine are equally compelling.
• Noted that whatever one believed, it could turn out to be
false.
– Thus, one could avoid frustration of being wrong by not
believing in anything.
• They lived within societal conventions.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Cynicism (1 of 2)

• Back-to-nature philosophy.
• Life free of wants, pleasures, and conventions of
society.
• True happiness depends on self-sufficiency.
• Quest for simple, independent natural life.
• Cynics argued that animals provide the best model
for human behavior.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Cynicism (2 of 2)

• Primary message was that nature should guide

human behavior.
• Social conventions, including religion, were human
inventions
– Cause shame, guilt, hypocrisy, greed, envy, and hate.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Epicureanism

• Epicureanism
– Philosophy of materialism, free will, no supernatural
influences in the world, and no afterlife.
– Goal of life is individual happiness, but not pure
hedonism
 Strive for tranquility that comes from balance between
a lack or an excess of anything; life of moderation.
– The good life was free, simple, rational, and moderate
and to be lived now because there was nothing else
after death.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Stoicism (1 of 2)

• Stoicism
– World ruled by a divine plan and everything in nature,
including humans, are there for a reason
– Everything happens for a reason, no accidents, all
must simply be accepted as part of the plan.
– The good life involves accepting one’s fate with
indifference even if suffering was involved.
– People are expected to accept their stations in life
without question.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Stoicism (2 of 2)

– Only personal freedom was in choosing whether to

act in accordance with nature’s plan.
– Stoicism won out over Epicureanism in the Roman
Empire.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Neoplatonism (1 of 2)

• Stressed the mystical aspects of Plato’s philosophy.

• Philo, the “Jewish Plato”
• Plotinus
• Philo, the “Jewish Plato”
– Like Plato, senses cannot provide knowledge
 Philo added that sensory experience interferes with direct
understanding of and communication with God.
– All knowledge and wisdom comes from God, not from
introspection, but soul must be purified
 True knowledge can be attained only by purified, passive
mind

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Neoplatonism (2 of 2)

• Plotinus
– Arranged all things in a hierarchy:
 First was God, followed by the Spirit, (a part of every
human soul), next, the soul, the cause of all things that
exist in the world.
– We must aspire to learn of the world beyond the
physical world—there, things are eternal, immutable,
and in a state of bliss.
– The body is the soul’s prison; through intense
meditation the souls of all humans can reach and
dwell with the eternal and changeless.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (1 of 9)

• Religious influences on the Roman Empire and early

Christian thought
– Religions from India and Persia
 Vendantism
o Perfection could be approximated by entering into
semiecstatic trances
 Zoroastrianism
o Individuals are caught in an eternal struggle between
wisdom and correctness on one hand, and ignorance
and evil on the other hand

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (2 of 9)

– Mystery religions from near east promulgated secret

rites, emphasis on death and renewal, purification,
and forgiveness of sins, and exaltation to new life.
– Greek culture was recognized by the Romans as
being important; thus it was preserved and
disseminated.
– Judaism—one God with an interest in human affairs
and a strict code of behavior for which one could be
rewarded or punished.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (3 of 9)

• Jesus
– Taught that the knowledge of good and evil is
revealed by God and should guide human conduct.
– Early Christian thought best described as a meshing
of Judeo-Christian
• St. Paul
– Was the first to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah
– Developed a combination of Judaic and Platonic
philosophy with emphasis on faith rather than reason

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (4 of 9)

– Humans divided into three parts: body, mind, and

spirit
 Spirit was spark of God within humans
o Through the spirit, humans can become close to God
 Body is source of evil
 Mind is caught between body and spirit: sometimes
serves the body, sometimes serves the spirit.
 Since humans are partly animalistic and partly divine,
conflict is the necessary consequence.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (5 of 9)

 St. Paul may have had some sexist views, such as women
were socially and intellectually inferior to men, but these
views were common during his time.
• Emperor Constantine
– Made Christianity a tolerated religion in the Roman
Empire
– Charged bishops with the task of creating a single set
of Christian documents concerning the teachings of
Jesus
– Christianity may have been more of political
expediency than religious conviction for Constantine

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (6 of 9)

• St. Augustine
– Combined Stoicism, Neoplatonism, Judaism, and
Christianity into a powerful Christian world view that
dominated Western life and thought for 1,000 years
until the 13th century
– Proposed a dualistic nature of man, with the body
similar to animals and the spirit close to or part of
God.
 These two opposing aspects became the Christian
struggle between God and Satan for human souls

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (7 of 9)

– Humans have the ability to choose between good and

evil
 Explains why evil is present in the world.
– All people have an internal sense that provides an
awareness of truth, error, personal obligation, and
moral right.
 This helps people evaluate experience and make
choices.
o In other words, behavior is under internal control, not
external events and consequences.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (8 of 9)

– In Confessions, Augustine described his sinful life,

including having mistresses, one of whom bore him a
child.
 When he was 32 years of age, he converted to
Christianity.
– For Augustine, the ultimate knowledge is to know
God.
 We can come to know God through two means: the
Scriptures, and examination of one’s inner self-
introspection.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Emphasis on Spirit (9 of 9)

– Time cannot be physically measured, but occurs in

the mind.
 Time experience depends on sensory experience and
the memory of sensory experience.
o The past is the presence in the mind of things
remembered.
o The future is the present anticipation of events based on
the memory of past experience.
o The present is current sensory experience.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 The Middle Ages

• The “Dark Age”

– Greek and Roman books and knowledge were lost.
 There was little or no progress in science, philosophy,
and literature.
– Europe became dominated by mysticism,
superstition, and anti-intellectualism.
– Church dogma became very powerful because it was
no longer challengeable.
– Crusades (end of the Dark Ages) resulted in
“rediscovery” of Aristotle’s writings preserved by Arab,
Muslim thinkers.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Islamic and Jewish influences (1 of 5)

• Muhammad
– Born in Mecca in 570
– Created Islam, which spread across the world.
– Muslims made great strides in medicine, science, and
mathematics.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Islamic and Jewish influences (2 of 5)

• Avicenna
– Physician/philosopher who wrote many books on
various topics including medicine, mathematics, logic
and metaphysics, Islamic theology, astronomy,
politics, and linguistics.
 His book on medicine was used in European
universities for centuries.
 He borrowed heavily from Aristotle but made many
modifications that persisted for hundreds of years.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

Islamic and Jewish influences (3 of 5)

– In analysis of human thinking, in addition to the five

external senses, he added seven “interior senses”
arranged in a hierarchy:
 Common sense
 Retentive imagination
 Compositive animal imagination
 Compositive human imagination
 Estimative power
 Ability to remember outcomes of past events
 Ability to use this information.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Islamic and Jewish influences (4 of 5)

– Avicenna used a wide variety of treatments for both

physical and mental illnesses
• Averroës
– Believed that human intelligence is arranged in a
hierarchy with the highest level enabling humans to
have contact with God.
– Discovered that the retina is the part of the eye that is
sensitive to light.
– Also noted that those who had smallpox were then
immune to the disease, which suggested inoculation
as a prevention technique.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Islamic and Jewish influences (5 of 5)

• Maimonides
– Sought to reconcile Judaism and Aristotelian
philosophy.
– Attempted to show that many passages in the Old
Testament and the Talmud could be understood
rationally and need not be taken on faith alone.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Reconciliation of Christian Faith and
Reason (1 of 2)
• St. Anselm
– Argued that perception and reason can and should
supplement Christian faith.
– The ontological argument for the existence of God
 When we think of something, there must exist
something that corresponds to those thoughts.
o If we think of a being in which no better or greater a
being can be thought, that must be God and he must
exist—a being “than which nothing greater can be
conceived.”

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Reconciliation of Christian Faith and
Reason (2 of 2)
• Peter Lombard
– He argued that we do not need to escape from the
empirical world to know God.
– One can learn about God by studying the empirical
world.
– Three ways to learn about God—faith, reason, and
the study of God’s works (the empirical world).

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Scholasticism (1 of 5)

• Scholasticism
– Synthesis of Aristotle’s philosophy and Christian
theology and showing what implications that
synthesis had for living one’s life
• Peter Abelard
– Goal was to use his dialectic method to overcome the
inconsistencies in the statements made by
theologians through the years.
– Reconciled the debate between realism and
nominalism with conceptualism.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Scholasticism (2 of 5)

 Once formed concepts exist apart from the individual

experiences upon which they were formed (realism).
 Concepts summarize individual experiences, which is
nominalism.
• Thomas Aquinas
– Synthesized Aristotle’s works and the Christian
tradition
 Once Aristotle’s ideas were assimilated into church
dogma, they were no longer challengeable.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Scholasticism (3 of 5)

– Aquinas argued effectively that reason and faith are

not incompatible but lead to the same thing—God and
his glory.
– Influence was substantial, but had the opposite effect
than what he desired.
– By admitting reason as a means of understanding
God, philosophers began to argue that faith and
reason could be studied separately, and thus reason
could be studied without considering its theological
implications.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Scholasticism (4 of 5)

– Philosophy without religious overtones became a

possibility and eventually a reality.
• St. Albertus Magnus
– Made a comprehensive review of both Aristotle’s
works and the Islamic and Jewish scholars’
interpretations of the works.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 Scholasticism (5 of 5)

• St. Bonaventure
– Fiercely condemned the works of Aristotle
– Believed one comes to believe God only through
introspection
– His point of view lives on in Protestantism

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

 William of Occam: A Turning Point

• Argued that in explaining things, no unnecessary

assumptions should be made
– Explanations need to be kept as parsimonious
(simple) as possible.
 By “shaving” these extraneous assumptions, one is
using Occam’s razor.
• Argued that we can trust our senses to tell us what
the world is really like, and that we can know the
world directly without need to worry about what lurks
beyond our experience.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

Spirit of the Times Before the Renaissance
(1 of 2)
• Two classes of people: believers and nonbelievers
– Nonbelievers, if not converted, were punished,
imprisoned, or killed and considered stupid or
possessed by the devil.
• Astrology and magic was practiced everywhere by
almost everyone.
– Superstition was omnipresent
 Characterized the behavior of peasants, kings,
scholars, and clergy.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.

Spirit of the Times Before the Renaissance
(2 of 2)
• For centuries there was little philosophical, scientific, or
theological progress.
• For progress to occur, the church’s authority had to be
broken
– It was beginning to fall apart.

© 2019 Cengage. All rights reserved.