The place of pleasure and pain in the functional psychology.

This article reviews the history of empirical aesthetics since its foundation by Fechner in 1876 to Berlyne’s new empirical aesthetics in the 1970s. The authors explain why and how Fechner founded the field, and how Wundt and Müller’s students continued his work in the early 20th century. In the United States, empirical aesthetics flourished as part of American functional psychology at first, and later as part of behaviorists’ interest in reward value. The heyday of behaviorism was also a golden age for the development of all sorts of tests for artistic and aesthetic aptitudes. The authors end the article by covering the contributions of Gestalt psychology and Berlyne’s motivational theory to empirical aesthetics.

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The relations of structural and functional psychology to philosophy.

10.1037/13076-008 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 55-73 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

James Rowland Angell

Keyword(s):

Functional Psychology

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In Praise of Functional Psychology

10.2307/j.ctv228vqv8.20 ◽

2002 ◽

pp. 166-178

Author(s):

Franck Ramus ◽

Jacques Mehler

Keyword(s):

Functional Psychology

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The Relations of Structural and Functional Psychology to Philosophy

The Philosophical Review ◽

10.2307/2177049 ◽

1903 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 243 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

James Rowland Angell

Keyword(s):

Functional Psychology

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Functional Psychology

Journal of Russian and East European Psychology ◽

10.2753/rpo1061-0405500101 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 6-52

Author(s):

Vitalii Shabel'nikov

Keyword(s):

Functional Psychology

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A.F. Losev and Psychology

Cultural-Historical Psychology ◽

10.17759/chp.2018140410 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 14 (4) ◽

pp. 72-87

Author(s):

E.A. Takho-Godi

Keyword(s):

Critical Review ◽

Thomas Aquinas ◽

Psychological Problems ◽

Genetic Method ◽

Social Existence ◽

Dionysius The Areopagite ◽

History Of Evolution ◽

School Research ◽

History Of ◽

Functional Psychology

This article is devoted to the great Russian philosopher A.F. Losev (1983—1988) and his place in the history of evolution of Russian psychology. Losev’s attitude to his scientific advisor at the Institute of Psychology, G.I. Chelpanov, as well as to the ensuing discussions between G.I. Chelpanov and K.N. Kornilov in the 1920s are being considered. Attention is focused on the generation of Losev’s interest in psychology, and consequent transformation of the works of the 1910s directly devoted to psychological problems (“Criticism of modern functional psychology”, “Critical review of the basic teachings and methods of the Würzburg School”, “Research on philosophy and psychology of thinking”). The evolution of psychological views of the thinker is described – from the enthusiasm of his student years for experimental and functional psychology to the construction of psychology based on the “genetic method”, and then, in the late 1920s, to the Platonic-patristic psychology outlined in the “Supplement to the Dialectics of Myth”. Proceeding from the new European psychology, including F. Brentano and E. Husserl guided by Thomas Aquinas (and through him by Aristotle), Losev builds his “absolute mythology”, based on the opposite tradition going back to neoplatonism, Dionysius the Areopagite and Nicholas of Cusa. The article shows how in the 1920s Losev developed a new, sociological, vision, the belief that every being (physical, physiological, psychological and naturalistically-causally-sociological, etc.) “is, in comparison with social existence, a pure abstraction”, and this does not lead to the rejection of “materialistic idealism” and “absolute mythology”. This sociological stand promotes the description of “relative mythologies” (collective psychology, social “myths”). In the 1930s—1940s, knowledge gained in the walls of the Institute of Psychology as well as Losev’s habit of self-observation and reflection about his own experiences contributed to the writing of psychological musical-philosophical prose, where Losev conceptualizes problems also addressed in his “octateuch” of the late 1920s.

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