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Philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne, 1885–1913
Author(s) -
Brooks John I.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/1520-6696(199304)29:2<123::aid-jhbs2300290204>3.0.co;2-c
Subject(s) - discipline , psychology, philosophy and physiology , philosophy of psychology , medical psychology , psychology , critical psychology , history of psychology , sociology , epistemology , social science , psychoanalysis , asian psychology , philosophy , political science , law , medline
Abstract The first university course in experimental psychology in Paris was located in the Faculty of Letters rather than the Faculty of Sciences or Medicine. The historical association of psychology with philosophy helps explain this placement, but this choice reinforced the philosophical character of the position at the expense of the experimental. In fact, the course included no laboratory instruction, with the exception of optional demonstrations conducted at psychological laboratories associated with the Faculty of Medicine. The fragmentation of the emerging discipline, distributed among divergent and competing Faculties, meant that training in experimental psychology may have been more difficult in France than in the United States or Germany, where laboratory research and training were more integrated. The first three instructors of the course—Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, and Georges Dumas—had a coherent vision of psychology as a synthesis of medical and philosophical approaches, but the matrix of institutional and disciplinary boundaries prevented them from bringing these approaches together.