"The proper study of mankind"?

in defence of the humanities against the exaggerated pretensions of "scientific" psychology

David Bridges

pp. 131-145

in: Paul Smeyers, Marc Depaepe (eds), Educational research: the attraction of psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

One of the central claims or aspirations of modern psychology is to place the study of the human mind and behaviour on a properly scientific basis. This chapter proposes that while such scientific study of human beings might reveal all sorts of interesting things about them, "the proper study of mankind" requires a different intellectual and imaginative apparatus rooted in the humanities and the more humanistic end of the social sciences.The chapter pursues this argument via William James (often regarded as one of the founding figures of modern psychology and especially educational psychology) and via Isaiah Berlin to the early eighteenth-century philosopher. Giambattista Vico whose reaction to Enlightenment science and mathematics led him to articulate a vision of a scienza nuova,or new science, essentially rooted in the humanities. Berlin's and Vico's works are joined in this chapter to Winch's advocacy of the centrality of philosophy to an understanding of human and social being. The result is to put a new emphasis on human self-consciousness and intentionality, on imagination or fantasia, on moral responsibility and self-questioning, on human experiencing of the natural and social world and on human understanding of the rules which they live by—as well as the cultural and historical framing of all these. In so far as these things are what constitute our humanity and in so far as these provide the very stuff of the subjects we roughly group together as the humanities, then this provides a case for valuing the contribution of the humanities to "the proper study of mankind" above the scientific pretensions of psychology.

Cited authors

James William

Vico Giambattista