Okay. So a lot of early psychologists were very inspired by philosophy, which makes sense. Right? Because philosophers are just trying to understand humans and that's exactly what the psychologists were doing too. And so in this video we're going to go over 2 famous philosophical debates that inspired many of the early themes in psychology.
So our first debate posed the question, what is the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body. And this was first answered by René Descartes with his idea of philosophical dualism. The idea behind dualism is that the mind and body are different. Okay, so this is in dual means 2, we have a body and a mind, the idea here being we have a physical body and an immaterial mind or an immaterial soul. And this was very, very popular when it was proposed because this is the idea that most major religions also believe and so people heard that and they were like, yeah, that sounds super good.
However, over time many philosophers including Descartes himself really could not give a satisfactory explanation as to, you know, if the mind and body are different things how are they interacting? Nobody could really answer that. And so this got contrasted with the idea of philosophical materialism which was popularized by Thomas Hobbes. And the idea here is that the mind and body are the same. Basically, the mind is what the brain does.
So for every event happening in the mind, whether it's a conscious thought, a feeling, an emotion, there is some kind of physical or chemical change happening in the brain that caused it. Now most modern psychologists, regardless of their personal religious beliefs obviously, most modern psychologists favor materialism. And we now, of course, have the benefit of neuroscience to actually show us that indeed, for every single event happening in the mind there is a physical event happening in the brain that we can tie to it. So that one kind of has a clear winner coming out at the end. Our next debate is going to be a little more ambiguous.
So the main question behind this debate was where does human knowledge come from? And this was answered by John Locke, very famous philosopher, with his idea of philosophical empiricism. And Locke believed that all knowledge, every single thing, is acquired through experience. He believed that humans are born as blank slates or as he said, tabula rasa, which is just Latin for blank slates. Sounds a bit fancier though.
Okay, so humans are born with absolutely nothing innate inside of us. We have to acquire every single thing through experience according to Locke. Now this was contrasted by philosophical nativism popularized by Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that some knowledge is innate. Basically, the idea here is that humans are born with some basic knowledge mainly for things like physics concepts like causality, space, time, as well as some basic math concepts.
And the idea here is not that you are born with a complete understanding of how space and time works, but just that there is something innate inside of you that is already present and that that and then basically that knowledge makes it easier for you to acquire additional knowledge about that concept. Now over time this evolved into probably the most famous debate in psychology, the nature versus nurture debate. And you might have even heard of this. It is very popular even in, like, pop culture. But the idea behind this debate is basically we're asking, you know, are people the way that they are because of their nature, because of something that is just innate inside of them, or are people the way they are because of their nurture, the way that they were raised, their environment?
And so this debate was very popular in the earlier days of psychology. People were going on really hard on either side saying it's all nature, it's all nurture, and modern psychologists don't really have this debate anymore. Nowadays we acknowledge that obviously experience is essential for learning. You need experience, to acquire knowledge. However, research has also shown that the human brain does appear to come kind of hardwired, with some basic concepts, for certain types of learning.
So, for example, humans do seem to be born with something innate inside of us that makes us prepared to acquire language and research has supported that. So nowadays, again, we don't have the nature versus nurture debate anymore. Modern psychologists agree that both concepts are equally important. Alright. So those are some of the philosophical debates that inspired early psychology and I'll see you guys in our next video.
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