Psychology in the 1600s

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What kind of questions were people asking during the 1600s? What kind of truth were they looking for? Who did they go to to ask these questions? "People" refers to everyday people, civilians, non-philosophers.

-- Karen Soriano (karensoriano@hotmail.com), April 29, 2001

Answers

Response to What were people asking...

There are many indeterminacies that make this question nearly impossible to answer, e.g., (1) People where? (2) Asking about what? To narrow things down a bit, if you mean what were people in western Europe asking about psychology, the question is still very difficult to answer because psychology was not yet a unified body of knowledge (a discipline). Christian doctrine addressed some questions about the nature of the mind and soul. Medicine addressed others. But it is unlikely that "civilians", in the main, had much access to the higher reaches of either theology or medicine. I am no expert on this topic, but my guess is that when people of this time had such questions, they would take them to the local priest (often the only "learned" person to whom they had regular access), or possibly to the local "healer" (who probably wasn't a trained "physician" but followed folk traditions). But one might wonder, instead, whether the vast majority of people were much interested in question that we would regard as being psychological, except when such matters had direct practical impacts on their lives (e.g., Why is brother dim? Why is father melancholic? Why is grandma losing her memory?). I think that general accounts of temperament and illness based on humors and diet and climate would have had widespread currency (not just among "learned" folk). The only way to really get started on answering your question, however, is to decide precisely which aspects of what we now call psychology you have in mind.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 29, 2001.

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