The project of an International Congress of Psychology by J. Ochorowicz (1881)

Since the second part of the 19th century, there has been a great increase in the number of international scientific congresses, and they appear a necessary step in the maturation of knowledge. The first person to explicitly suggest the necessity of an international congress of psychology was Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917), who was considered the founder of Polish psychology. In 1881 he sent an article to Théodule Ribot, editor of Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger, entitled “Project of an International Congress of Psychology,” which was published in Ribot's journal. In it he described the dispersed state of psychology in 1881 and the previous 50 years, including 12 subdisciplines ranging from psychophysics to the psychology of art, and how it should aim for unification. He suggested collective efforts to progress rapidly, with widespread collaboration and the continuous exchange of observations, information, and experiments. Having international congresses would constitute a forum for such exchanges, and in his article he outlined the steps that should be taken for putting together the first international congress of psychology. The proposal was quite extensive and fanciful, making Ribot somewhat doubt its realizability. Nevertheless, the first international psychology congress took place in Paris in 1889, 8 years after the publication of Ochorowicz's article. This quick development could be attributed to the creation of the psychology societies, one of the first being La Société de Psychologie Physiologique, which was created in France in 1885. The creation of this society also contributed to psychology being recognized as a scientific domain. In line with this, the final programme of the congress was less extensive than that proposed in Ochorowicz's article, focusing on physiological aspects and ignoring the philosophical ones. In the present paper, the historical context of Ochorowicz's article is outlined, followed by a translation of his article.     

How Pierre Janet used pathological psychology to save the philosophical self

According to traditional French historiography, French scientific psychology was born when it differentiated itself from philosophy. This split between the two disciplines is attributed to Taine and Ribot, who, consequently, are considered to be the "founding fathers" of French psychology. In this paper we shall examine the case of Pierre Janet, who, at the turn of the century, was recognized worldwide as the most important French psychologist. It is generally said that he was the follower of Ribot and of Charcot. However, he was also Paul Janet's nephew. Paul Janet was a very well known and influential philosopher of the so-called French "spiritualistic" school, for which psychology was central to philosophy. In 1889, Pierre Janet published his doctoral dissertation, L'Automatisme psychologique, which was immediately considered to be a classic in psychology. We shall argue that this book is as much indebted to the old spiritualistic psychology, which claimed the substantial unity of the self, as to the new psychology at the time, which questioned it. With Pierre Janet, the split between psychology and philosophy in France was reconsidered. It would be more accurate to speak in terms of a compromise between philosophy and the "new" physiological and pathological psychology.     

Introducing psychology as an academic discipline in France: Théodule Ribot and the Collège de France (1888-1901)

This paper describes the context in which the teaching of psychology as an autonomous discipline was introduced in France, and reproduces the first psychology lecture given in France by Théodule Ribot on 9 April 1888 at The Collège de France. In France, this recognition was delayed because of the negative influence of spiritualist philosophy. It took both the acknowledged status of a man (Ribot) and a minister's decision for this new type of teaching to be accepted in France. After describing the events that took place at the Collège de France and at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, we reproduce in full Ribot's inaugural lecture at the Collège, an important document for the history of French psychology. We conclude by describing the circumstances in which this teaching came to its end in 1901.     

L'annee psychologique: history of the founding of a 100-year-old

The authors present the history of the founding of the French journal L'Annee Psychologique. The names of Theodule Ribot (1839-1916), Henry Beaunis (1830-1921), and Alfred Binet (1857-1911) are closely associated with the journal. Ribot's election to the chair of Experimental and Comparative Psychology at the College de France in 1888 marked the official emancipation of psychology in France. Because there was no laboratory associated with the chair, Beaunis, a physiological psychologist from Nancy, proposed to Ribot the creation of the first French laboratory of experimental psychology (1889). Under Beaunis's direction, this laboratory was established at the Sorbonne in Paris but was in fact dependent on another educational institution, L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1893 the laboratory's research was first published in a yearly journal named Travaux du Laboratoire de Psychologie Physiologique (2 volumes: 1893-1894). Binet, who joined the laboratory in 1891, was not satisfied by the form of this publication. With Beaunis's agreement, he then created L'Annee Psychologique in 1894 to develop the reputation of the laboratory's research. The authors present the evolution and vicissitudes of the journal from 1895 to 1912, with a glance up to the present.     

Moral education for the elite of democracy: the classe de philosophie between sociology and philosophy

In this article, I address the issues at stake in the relationship between sociology and philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century by focusing on a debate between two parties: Emile Durkheim, who was attempting to found an independent scientific sociology, and the editors and collaborators of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (RMM), one of the central philosophical journals of the period. This debate focused on the role of philosophy in secondary school education, but at its heart, this was a struggle between two disciplines over which ought to direct the formation of good citizens for Third Republic France.     

Théodule Ribot's ambiguous positivism: philosophical and epistemological strategies in the founding of French scientific psychology

Théodule Ribot (1839-1916) is regarded by many historians of psychology as the "father" of the discipline in France. Ribot contributed to the development of a "new psychology" independent from philosophy, relying on the methods of the natural sciences. However, such an epistemological transition encountered fierce opposition from both the champions of the old-fashioned metaphysical psychology and the representatives of the "scientific spirit." This article focuses on the objections raised by the latter, and especially philosophers of science, against the possibility of a scientific psychology. For instance, according to Auguste Comte, psychology does not satisfy certain basic methodological requirements. To overcome these objections, Ribot, in his La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine (1870/1914), devised an epistemological strategy that amounted to invoking criticisms of Comte's views made by other representatives of the positivist school, such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.     

Wittgenstein on the Place of the Concept “Noticing an Aspect”

Seeing aspects is a dominant theme in Wittgenstein's 1940s writings on philosophy of psychology. Interpreters disagree about what Wittgenstein was trying to do in these discussions. I argue that interpreting Wittgenstein's observations about the interrelations between “noticing an aspect” and other psychological concepts as a systematic theory of aspect‐seeing diminishes key lessons of Wittgenstein's explorations: these interrelations are enormously complicated and “noticing an aspect” resists neat classification. Further, Wittgenstein invites us to engage in his “placing activity,” and by doing so we are building a skill that is valuable for enabling us to help ourselves when we encounter conceptual difficulties.     

Alfred Binet and higher education

At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred Binet sought teaching positions at the Collége de France and the Sorbonne. Binet wanted to develop experimental psychology in France, but the strong psychopathological orientation of French psychology blocked his ambition. The 1st part of this article relates the history of the introduction of psychology, via Théodule Ribot, to the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Ribot's premature retirement from the Collège de France in 1901 triggered a battle that led to Binet's repeated failure to gain access to these institutions of highter education and the success in 1902 of Ribot's students: Pierre Janet at the Collège de France and George Dumas at the Sorbonne.     

Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology

Simone de Beauvoir has written of the sense of excitement that marked Jean-Paul Sartre's first encounter with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. Perhaps no work of Sartre's communicates this excitement, and the reason for it, quite so transparently as his brief 1939 essay on Husserl's notion of intentionality. Husserl here appears as a revolutionary, almost as a saviour, who has provided the necessary key for putting philosophy back in touch with the ordinary experience which both French realism and French idealism had vainly sought to characterize. Realism and idealism alike had been guilty in effect of a reduplication of things in consciousness, dependence on an often unexpressed correspondence theory which made mental surrogates for the real the only reality available to man. But if the present essay testifies to Sartre's attempt to return French thought to immediate contact with things, it enters into a fascinating dialectical tension with another of Sartre's chief motives—to purify immediate experience of its deceptions through a highly reflective, analytic mediation. The essay first appeared in Nouvelle Revue Francaise, LII, January 1939. (Tr.)     

Growth in agreement II: Reports and agreed statements of ecumenical conversations on a world level 1982–98∗

The French thinkers who influenced the American social activist Dorothy Day through Peter Maurin are representative of French progressive thought connected with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and its 1931 successor, Quadragesimo Anno. This article discusses the influence of Kropotkin, de Foucauld, Maritain and Mounier on Day. In France itself, this thought was often frustrated but Day provides an example of the implementation of Roman Catholic Personalism in the American setting. Day was both a popularising journalist and a tireless practitioner of the threefold platform deriving from Maurin's philosophy of Roundtable Discussion, Farming Communes and Houses of Hospitality. By the early 1950s, the tangential nature of Day's interest in the worker priest movement, when the question of its suppression had global prominence, shows that Maurin had been successful not in interesting her in his French influences for their own sake but in bequeathing to her a workable synthesis as a framework for her own efforts.     

Influence of aging on recovery from aphasia in polyglots

We analyzed patterns of recovery, according to the rules of Pitres [1895, Revue de Medecine (Paris), 15, 873–899] and Ribot (1881, Les Maladies de la Memoire, Paris: Libraire Germer Baillere et Cie, pp. 146–147), in polyglot aphasics divided into subgroups by age. The rule of Ribot did not apply predictably for any age group. Pitres' rule clearly applied, but only for the nonelderly groups. Aging and its concomitant deterioration of recent memory seem to influence patterns of recovery from aphasia in polyglots.     

Ribot, Binet, and the emergence from the anthropological shadow

In the drive to establish a naturalistic psychology in France, anthropological assumptions about a hierarchy of physically determined racial groups with inherent psychological characteristics and about the nearly insurmountable retardation of primitive cultures permeated the work of the founder of French empirical psychology, Théodule Ribot. Assumptions about the correlation of brain mass and head size with intelligence affected Alfred Binet. The rise of sociology and challenges to existing theories of inheritance led Ribot to surrender fitfully some hereditarian assumptions. Binet's experimental caution and contemporary critiques of anthropometry tempered, but did not fully extinguish, his enthusiasm for psychophysical correlations.     

Normalizing the Supernormal: The Formation of the “Gesellschaft Für Psychologische Forschung” (“Society for Psychological Research”), c. 1886–1890

This paper traces the formation of the German “Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung” (“Society for Psychological Research”), whose constitutive branches in Munich and Berlin were originally founded as inlets for alternatives to Wundtian experimental psychology from France and England, that is, experimental researches into hypnotism and alleged supernormal phenomena. By utilizing the career trajectories of Max Dessoir and Albert von Schrenck‐Notzing as founding members of the “Gesellschaft,” this paper aims to open up novel perspectives regarding extra‐scientific factors involved in historically determining the epistemological and methodological boundaries of nascent psychology in Germany.     

V. M. BEKHTEREV IN RUSSIAN CHILD SCIENCE, 1900S–1920S: “OBJECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY”/“REFLEXOLOGY” AS A SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT

In the early 20^th century the child population became a major focus of scientific, professional and public interest. This led to the crystallization of a dynamic field of child science, encompassing developmental and educational psychology, child psychiatry and special education, school hygiene and mental testing, juvenile criminology and the anthropology of childhood. This article discusses the role played in child science by the eminent Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev. The latter's name is associated with a distinctive program for transforming the human sciences in general and psychology in particular that he in the 1900s labelled “objective psychology” and from the 1910s renamed “reflexology.” The article examines the equivocal place that Bekhterev's “objective psychology” and “reflexology” occupied in Russian/Soviet child science in the first three decades of the 20^th century. While Bekhterev's prominence in this field is beyond doubt, analysis shows that “objective psychology” and “reflexology” had much less success in mobilizing support within it than certain other movements in this arena (for example, “experimental pedagogy” in the pre‐revolutionary era); it also found it difficult to compete with the variety of rival programs that arose within Soviet “pedology” during the 1920s. However, this article also demonstrates that the study of child development played a pivotal role in Bekhterev's program for the transformation of the human sciences: it was especially important to his efforts to ground in empirical phenomena and in concrete research practices a new ontology of the psychological, which, the article argues, underpinned “objective psychology”/“reflexology” as a transformative scientific movement.     

“Part of the Very Concept”: Wittgensteinian Moral Philosophy1

X is “part of the very concept” of Y. This formulation recurs throughout Raimond Gaita's philosophy and informs Christopher Cordner's. I elucidate the formulation's meaning and the nature of the necessity posited, then conclude with a criticism. One cannot love evil. One cannot love cow dung. For Gaita, these claims differ in type. The first testifies to a conceptual relation, but the second to a “mere fact.” I see no clear basis for assigning to claims one type over another, which challenges the footing of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy. Why do no moral“mere facts” partly define our form of life?     

Twenty‐two years of psychological science in Psychological Science

The journal Psychological Science (PS) has undergone various changes over 22 years since its birth in 1990. Analysis of Web of Science's records shows that the publication has increased in volume and collaborations between authors, and has become more international. Keyword analysis suggests the new role of neuroscience in contemporary psychology and indicates that the PS of today is more oriented than in the 1990s towards psychosocial and emotional issues as well as natural situations in our daily lives (ecological validity).     

Validation française d'un inventaire de micro-stresseurs de la vie quotidienne: combinaison du “Daily Hassles Scale” et du “Uplifts Scale”

Ce travail présente les résultats d'une étude de validité de la version française d'un instrument d'auto-évaluation des micro-stresseurs de la vie quotidienne (“Daily Hassles Scale”; “Uplifts Scale”; Lazarus & Folkman, 1989). Les informations de validité reposent sur des structures factorielles ainsi que des analyses de cohérence interne et de convergence avec une mesure de stress psychologique (MSP: Lemyre, Tessier, & Fillion, 1990). Auprès d'une communauté universitaire (N = 265), six facteurs d'embětements quotidiens et cinq facteurs d'encouragements journaliers ont été isolés. Comme prévu, le score d'intensité aux différents facteurs d'embětements corrèle positivement et significativement avec l'état d'ětre stressé ce qui n'est pas le cas des encouragements quotidiens. La discussion soulève la nécessité d'utiliser différents groupes de micro-stresseurs plutôt qu'un facteur général. Elle évalue également le rôle ambigu des encouragements quotidiens comme facteur de protection dans l'expérience du stress.     

American Psychology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

It is doubtful whether there ever has been a rise‐fall‐rebirth of the psychology of religion. While the claim has marginal merit for American academic psychology, it has little application in other cultures or even within American psychology of religion outside mainstream psychology. The psychology of religion has always been and remains tied to key individuals who sustain the field. This historical fact is important in understanding the role of the JSSR in the field. Early psychologists of religion such as Hall and James set the pattern for two distinctively different approaches to the psychology of religion. Hall's approach was methodologically restrictive, inherently reductive, and came to dominate the academic psychology of religion. James ‘approach was methodological plural, receptive to the evidential force of religious experience, and quickly marginalized within American psychology. These opposing orientation continue to influence the psychology of religion in societies such as the SSR and its journal. A review of the psychologist editors of JSSR illustrates that the psychology of religion remains a marginal interest of mainstream psychology. It survives because of the interdisciplinary nature of the SSSR and its journal.     

Postmodernism: A Feminist Critique

In this article the author suggests that progress in philosophy can be conceived through contemporary French theories that propose a new, polysemantic way of thinking. Postmodern philosophy has tried to renew the meaning of the subject, of the subject's identity, and of language and communication. The author believes that the postmodern, feminist approach to those concepts represents significant progress in philosophy. It is, in fact, exactly in the context of feminism—conceived of not just as a women's sociopolitical or scientific activity but as a broad theoretical approach to many areas—that Western philosophy has acquired its most explicit and adequate meaning. A crucial example here is the new historicophilosophical analysis of the concept of gender. The author appeals to Lipovetsky, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, and other thinkers to show how postmodern feminism helps to overcome the binary vision of the contemporary world and the dichotomic composition of earlier philosophical thought.     

The definition of sociology and the sociology of definition: Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method and high school philosophy in France

Despite his attempts to break with philosophy and found a science of society, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was involved with philosophy throughout his career. Academic philosophy in France was a highly centralized institution that produced professors capable of teaching a standard curriculum. These professors made up a significant portion of the audience whose support Durkheim hoped to win for his sociological project. The concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and the literature on the rhetoric of the human sciences can help reconstruct the field of academic philosophy, Durkheim's relationship with it, and the ways in which he drew upon it to formulate his method and to persuade his philosophical colleagues. Durkheim's definition of the social fact in The Rules of Sociological Method can only be understood in the context of French academic philosophy. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.