Translation of: Les sciences de l'âme: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-405) and index.
Contents:
The "Century of psychology" -- Psychology as a discipline -- A long past but a short history? -- Psychology in the sixteenth century: a project in the making? -- The function of the neologism "psychology" -- Aristotelianism and galenism -- Psychologia and the scientia de anima -- Rudolph Goclenius's psychologia -- From the science of the living being to the science of the human mind -- Psychology as the generic science of the living being -- Psychologia and empsychologia -- On whether de anima books can themselves constitute a science -- From soul-form to soul-mind -- Psychology as a metaphysics of the rational soul -- The new psychology: Christian Wolff -- Psychology in the age of enlightenment -- Psychology, anthropology and the human sciences -- A republic of letters -- Methodological discussions in enlightenment psychology -- "The best way to perfect this fine science" -- Historicizing psychology -- Inventing a bibliographic tradition -- Constructing a history for psychology -- "Psychologiae historico-criticae speciminae" -- The history of the "theory of ideas" -- Philosophers write the history of psychology -- Psychology and the history of humankind -- Friedrich August Carus and the "history of humanity" -- The primitives and the ancients -- Toward a total history of psychology -- The psychology of the Hebrews -- Homeric psychology -- Anthropology's place in the encyclopedias -- Enlightenment encyclopedias -- The syntax of the Encyclopédies -- The Paris and Yverdon Encyclopédies -- The "systèmes figurés" -- Anthropology in the text -- The anthropological transformation of morals -- Human perfectibility and the primacy of psychology -- Psychology in the Paris Encyclopédie -- Psychology in the Yverdon Encyclopédie -- The fields claimed for psychology -- Metaphysics -- Logic -- Morals -- The psycho-anthropology of perfectibility -- The union and interaction of the soul and the body -- Psychology, the body and personal identity -- The soul, the body and the "completeness of the nerve" -- Psycho-theology and "modern identity" -- The body in resurrection -- The loss of the body -- The seed and the brain -- The emergence of the cerebral subject.
Summary:
The Sciences of the Soul" is the first attempt to explain the development of the disciplinary conception of psychology from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Fernando Vidal traces this development through university courses and textbooks, encyclopedias, and nonacademic books, as well as through various histories of psychology. Vidal reveals that psychology existed before the eighteenth century essentially as a "physics of the soul", and it belonged as much to natural philosophy as to Christian anthropology. It remained so until the eighteenth century, when the "science of the soul" became the "science of the mind". Vidal demonstrates that this Enlightenment refashioning took place within a Christian framework, and he explores how the preservation of the Christian idea of the soul was essential to the development of the science. Not only were most psychologists convinced that an empirical science of the soul was compatible with Christian faith; their perception that psychology preserved the soul also helped to elevate its rank as an empirical science. Broad-ranging and impeccably researched, this book will be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe. -- Book cover.
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