system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Psychology wasn't really an established field before the fin de siècle, so what did Nietzsche, Kant et al mean by "psychology" or "psychologist"?
gpt
Undergraduate psychology textbooks usually say that psychology started with Wilhelm Wundt in 1879, but if you look into the fine print, it’s because Wundt specifically started the first laboratory dedicated to the scientific study of psychology. And therein lies the rub: what started in 1879 was a separate discipline which saw itself as scientific; *the study of the mind* definitely did not start in 1879. After all, plenty of the concepts used by the scientific psychologists to explain their experiments have origins in, or predecessors in, the Enlightenment psychology of Descartes, Hume, Kant, etc. So someone investigating psychology in 1812 was investigating many of the same topics that a modern psychologist would; they just were using a philosopher’s tools - logic and argument, conscious experience and theorising - rather than putting statistics into SPSS and having different control groups, etc.