Philosophy is a study that has no obvious answers to the questions posed, since there are no obvious or clear answers to the questions then the questions are naturally undisputed and true. Philosophy is rather the study of the questions themselves. Things that are clear and obvious are not questions that have to be philosophical dissected they are self-evident. Philosophy clearly shows that there have been numerous and diverse interpretations of philosophical issues, it would nevertheless appear that all philosophies of man, however are at war with one another, are philosophies.
Chapter one simply is an introduction to the character of philosophy. For instance, Azar breaks down philosophy as the love of wisdom. Wisdom here becomes knowledge of things through their highest causes. Philosophy here becomes a type of wonder or superior curiosity whereby we seek to penetrate to the very roots of things: and hence a philosopher, or a lover of wisdom, is one who seeks the highest or most ultimate causes of things. Mystery is all about us, the inconceivable permeates us, and it is closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. Mysticism is any science that scientists do not understand. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. However much of what we may understand is certain aspects of the world, the fact of existence as we know it in our experience is essentially a mystery. There is a mystery that arises from the attempt to face up to reality of our very existence as conscious beings. It is not mysterious that the human zygote, working in the dark and without experience, is unable to produce 206 bones and 639 muscles, or that the human body’s thirty trillion cells are intended to perform approximately 10,000 chemical functions.
Philosophy is the knowledge of things through their ultimate principles or causes, insofar as this is stainable through our natural powers. By maintaining that philosophy is a search for ultimates, means that the object of philosophy is irreducible. An ultimate explanation is consequently basic or primary: it presupposes no other explanation, whereas other explanations presuppose it. The difference between a proximate and an ultimate explanation is exemplified in the tale about an Indian who, when asked, “What holds up the earth?” answered, “A huge elephant.” Asked what holds up the elephant, he replied, “A tremendous turtle.” And to the query “What supports the turtle?” came the response. “Something; I know not what.” A philosopher, then, is not one who cultivates his mind in such a way as to look for ultimates, and not to be content with such a mentality as characterizes the Indian in the foregoing illustration. The preceding citations indicate one further difference between science and philosophy, whereas each science cuts off a portion of reality and ignores the remainder. Philosophy reverses the direction and seeks the total picture, a worldview. Scientific knowledge is abstract, for to abstract is to consider one aspect of a thing while ignoring its other aspects. Proximate sciences cannot exist without abstraction although abstraction is necessary it may incline a scientist to confuse his abstraction with complete reality. The preceding exposition should at least indicate the important relationship between philosophy and the other sciences. The view Azar is proposing is this, which whereas the natural or physical sciences are restricted to this area of the proximate, philosophy is a search for ultimates. This distinction between philosophy and the natural sciences should not incline us to infer that philosophy is antiscientific or even unscientific. Philosophy is considered a science, to know why a true statement is true is to know it could not be otherwise for this reason, scientific knowledge is said to be characterized by necessity. In asserting that science is the knowledge of the reasoned fact, we are stating that the scientists start with the knowledge of something and proceeds there from to its causal explanation. The mind is proceeding from knowledge to science, not from ignorance to knowledge or from what is better known to what is lesser known.
So far we have learned the nature of philosophy; we have already seen that biology is distinguished from philosophy as the proximate is differentiated from the ultimate. In Azar’s chapter two, Lines of Demarcation, there are distinct lines that separate the types of psychologies and the difference between a psychologist and a philosopher. Psychologists have also been philosophers: inasmuch as psychology means the study or science of the soul, then it follows that anyone studying the soul would be a psychologist, and since the soul is an ultimate notion, it should properly be studied by the philosopher, however, a philosopher claims to be investigating the soul. Living beings are investigated in what is called experimental psychology. The fact that it is impossible for us to comprehend the cognitive and affective experiences unless we know what love or pain is from our own experiences. Again if a human has not known from their own experience what fear or pleasure means, they could never recognize these in a cat. It is through human beings own subjective experiences, then, that they come to know the feeling of emotion. Humans as well as psychologists cannot discuss psychological behavior without subjective experience. This is how psychology differs from most sciences. This subjective method whereby the fundamentals of human life are obtained is called introspection. Humans are certain that they have a life-giving principle so it is therefore internal experience which affords us with the certitude that a soul exists and from the primary experience of ourselves as alive, we attribute life to other things that act as some how as we do. Many psychologists maintained that the only proper method for the psychologist was the experimental method.
Behavior can be described and explained without making reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. The sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal (in the mind). Behaviorism is a doctrine, or a set of doctrines, about human and nonhuman animal behavior. An important component of many psychological theories in the late nineteenth century were introspection, the study of the mind by analysis of one's own thought processes. It was in reaction to this trend that behaviorism arose, claiming that the causes of behavior need not be sought in the depths of the mind but could be observed in the immediate environment, in stimuli that elicited, reinforced, and punished certain responses. The explanation, in other words, lay in learning, the process whereby behavior changes in response to the environment. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the scientist began to uncover the actual mechanism of learning, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for behaviorism. The contributions of four particular scientists are Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner.
Azar’s chapter three sets the building blocks on which all psychology is based upon by introducing significant contributors such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Adler and Sagan. Plato was one of whose fundamental problems centered about the nature of the soul. The soul is an intermediary between the worlds of matter and forms: it pre-existed, was produced by god and is immortal. For Plato moreover, the soul is the principle of life; it is a principle where everything is alive. The body which is moved from without is soulless: but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. Aristotle believed that to fully be a man, one must try to be like the gods, or immortalize them. This will free one from the restrictions of mortal thought. Descartes realized that he could, in fact, doubt absolutely everything, save one indubitable truth: I think, therefore I am. The self that doubts its own existence must exist to be able to doubt, moreover, a self that doubts must not only exist, but must exist rationally. Descartes, armed with his clear and distinct test discovers that he has certain knowledge that God exists. The idea of God must come from a reality that is at least as perfect as the idea. I exist as a thing that has an idea of God. Everything that exists has a cause that brought it into existence and that sustains it in existence. The only thing adequate to cause and sustain me, a thing that has an idea of God, is God. Therefore God exists A thing needs a cause to be sustained God is invoked by Descartes as the cause of him. My conception of God is the conception of a being that posses all perfections. If God is supreme good, he/she is incapable of deceit. If God is incapable of deceit, the reality of the world can be accepted because God would not have us perceive a world that did not, in fact, exist.
To conclude the issue is not weather or not to have a philosophy of psychology, but weather to have one that is conscious or unconscious. Psychology is, by its nature, forever dependent on philosophy: it is indeed a science dealing with the facts, but it is on the other the other hand so close to metaphysics that without clear ideas on the problems of philosophical anthropology it becomes the victim of the worst confusion and gets lost in the most amazing errors.
Chapter one simply is an introduction to the character of philosophy. For instance, Azar breaks down philosophy as the love of wisdom. Wisdom here becomes knowledge of things through their highest causes. Philosophy here becomes a type of wonder or superior curiosity whereby we seek to penetrate to the very roots of things: and hence a philosopher, or a lover of wisdom, is one who seeks the highest or most ultimate causes of things. Mystery is all about us, the inconceivable permeates us, and it is closer than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. Mysticism is any science that scientists do not understand. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. However much of what we may understand is certain aspects of the world, the fact of existence as we know it in our experience is essentially a mystery. There is a mystery that arises from the attempt to face up to reality of our very existence as conscious beings. It is not mysterious that the human zygote, working in the dark and without experience, is unable to produce 206 bones and 639 muscles, or that the human body’s thirty trillion cells are intended to perform approximately 10,000 chemical functions.
Philosophy is the knowledge of things through their ultimate principles or causes, insofar as this is stainable through our natural powers. By maintaining that philosophy is a search for ultimates, means that the object of philosophy is irreducible. An ultimate explanation is consequently basic or primary: it presupposes no other explanation, whereas other explanations presuppose it. The difference between a proximate and an ultimate explanation is exemplified in the tale about an Indian who, when asked, “What holds up the earth?” answered, “A huge elephant.” Asked what holds up the elephant, he replied, “A tremendous turtle.” And to the query “What supports the turtle?” came the response. “Something; I know not what.” A philosopher, then, is not one who cultivates his mind in such a way as to look for ultimates, and not to be content with such a mentality as characterizes the Indian in the foregoing illustration. The preceding citations indicate one further difference between science and philosophy, whereas each science cuts off a portion of reality and ignores the remainder. Philosophy reverses the direction and seeks the total picture, a worldview. Scientific knowledge is abstract, for to abstract is to consider one aspect of a thing while ignoring its other aspects. Proximate sciences cannot exist without abstraction although abstraction is necessary it may incline a scientist to confuse his abstraction with complete reality. The preceding exposition should at least indicate the important relationship between philosophy and the other sciences. The view Azar is proposing is this, which whereas the natural or physical sciences are restricted to this area of the proximate, philosophy is a search for ultimates. This distinction between philosophy and the natural sciences should not incline us to infer that philosophy is antiscientific or even unscientific. Philosophy is considered a science, to know why a true statement is true is to know it could not be otherwise for this reason, scientific knowledge is said to be characterized by necessity. In asserting that science is the knowledge of the reasoned fact, we are stating that the scientists start with the knowledge of something and proceeds there from to its causal explanation. The mind is proceeding from knowledge to science, not from ignorance to knowledge or from what is better known to what is lesser known.
So far we have learned the nature of philosophy; we have already seen that biology is distinguished from philosophy as the proximate is differentiated from the ultimate. In Azar’s chapter two, Lines of Demarcation, there are distinct lines that separate the types of psychologies and the difference between a psychologist and a philosopher. Psychologists have also been philosophers: inasmuch as psychology means the study or science of the soul, then it follows that anyone studying the soul would be a psychologist, and since the soul is an ultimate notion, it should properly be studied by the philosopher, however, a philosopher claims to be investigating the soul. Living beings are investigated in what is called experimental psychology. The fact that it is impossible for us to comprehend the cognitive and affective experiences unless we know what love or pain is from our own experiences. Again if a human has not known from their own experience what fear or pleasure means, they could never recognize these in a cat. It is through human beings own subjective experiences, then, that they come to know the feeling of emotion. Humans as well as psychologists cannot discuss psychological behavior without subjective experience. This is how psychology differs from most sciences. This subjective method whereby the fundamentals of human life are obtained is called introspection. Humans are certain that they have a life-giving principle so it is therefore internal experience which affords us with the certitude that a soul exists and from the primary experience of ourselves as alive, we attribute life to other things that act as some how as we do. Many psychologists maintained that the only proper method for the psychologist was the experimental method.
Behavior can be described and explained without making reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes. The sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not internal (in the mind). Behaviorism is a doctrine, or a set of doctrines, about human and nonhuman animal behavior. An important component of many psychological theories in the late nineteenth century were introspection, the study of the mind by analysis of one's own thought processes. It was in reaction to this trend that behaviorism arose, claiming that the causes of behavior need not be sought in the depths of the mind but could be observed in the immediate environment, in stimuli that elicited, reinforced, and punished certain responses. The explanation, in other words, lay in learning, the process whereby behavior changes in response to the environment. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the scientist began to uncover the actual mechanism of learning, thereby laying the theoretical foundation for behaviorism. The contributions of four particular scientists are Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner.
Azar’s chapter three sets the building blocks on which all psychology is based upon by introducing significant contributors such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Adler and Sagan. Plato was one of whose fundamental problems centered about the nature of the soul. The soul is an intermediary between the worlds of matter and forms: it pre-existed, was produced by god and is immortal. For Plato moreover, the soul is the principle of life; it is a principle where everything is alive. The body which is moved from without is soulless: but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. Aristotle believed that to fully be a man, one must try to be like the gods, or immortalize them. This will free one from the restrictions of mortal thought. Descartes realized that he could, in fact, doubt absolutely everything, save one indubitable truth: I think, therefore I am. The self that doubts its own existence must exist to be able to doubt, moreover, a self that doubts must not only exist, but must exist rationally. Descartes, armed with his clear and distinct test discovers that he has certain knowledge that God exists. The idea of God must come from a reality that is at least as perfect as the idea. I exist as a thing that has an idea of God. Everything that exists has a cause that brought it into existence and that sustains it in existence. The only thing adequate to cause and sustain me, a thing that has an idea of God, is God. Therefore God exists A thing needs a cause to be sustained God is invoked by Descartes as the cause of him. My conception of God is the conception of a being that posses all perfections. If God is supreme good, he/she is incapable of deceit. If God is incapable of deceit, the reality of the world can be accepted because God would not have us perceive a world that did not, in fact, exist.
To conclude the issue is not weather or not to have a philosophy of psychology, but weather to have one that is conscious or unconscious. Psychology is, by its nature, forever dependent on philosophy: it is indeed a science dealing with the facts, but it is on the other the other hand so close to metaphysics that without clear ideas on the problems of philosophical anthropology it becomes the victim of the worst confusion and gets lost in the most amazing errors.
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