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Late in his life, Wundt published a book on Leibniz, 200 years after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in 1716. In this book, he states a long-lasting interest in Leibniz. He grasped the opportunity to summarize this interest as a part of the memorial in 1916. A closer reading of this book, however, is not just a celebration speech of Leibniz. It is a highly personal confession of the importance of Leibniz’s intellectual activities as a forerunner to some fundamentals for Wundt’s experimental and folk psychology. Yet, by drawing the line back to Leibniz, Wundt also indirectly sketches and includes those intermediate scholars that contributed with continuing the historical line between them. In this paper, Wundt’s reading of Leibniz is examined. One of the striking aspects of his reading is that he is not so interested in Leibniz’s philosophy, as he is of his mathematical thinking. Leibniz’s discovery of differential calculus, the aspect of dynamics in physics and his critic of the mechanistic understanding of causality are probably some of the most important changes that paved the way for modernity and the modern thinking. Wundt makes an indirect connection between those discoveries and the forthcoming psychology. However, Leibniz did not apply the term “psychology”, but Wundt did not hesitate to regard aspects of Leibniz’s authorship as contributions to psychology. The use of the term related to Leibniz is justified by the fact that the one who systematized Leibniz’s philosophy was his student Christian Wolff. This was also the same person to be the first one in the history to include and apply the term psychology as a core aspect of philosophy. The reaction Kant had on this is well known. Thus, this paper will concentrate on the link between Wundt and Leibniz to shed some light on the upcoming use of the term psychology on its way to achieve the status as an experimental science at the end of the nineteenth century.

In this paper we reflect upon inner silence as a path to embrace eudemonia in relation to Dialogical Self Theory. We suggest that the awareness of the dynamics of different I- positions can empower the person to feel more freedom over their thoughts, feelings and actions. Thus, inner silence can promote the capacity to activate meta-positions or de- positioning, which are shifts of attentional foci in the stream of consciousness. The practice of inner silence can also promote the experience of genuine dialogues, by encouraging the flow and flexibility of the self, and by strengthening the connection with the experience of values. We also suggest a number of implications for counselling associated with self-exploration and self- transcendence, such as meditation, contemplation and prayer.

Along with an impressive academic career, Jaan Valsiner has revitalized and developed an abundance of scientific notions that stand at the basis of theorization in psychology. Most of them have had great impact on several scholars all over the world. In this paper, we would like to focus on just one of these notions: “pleromatization.” According to Valsiner (The overwhelming world: Functions of pleromatization in creating diversity in cultural and natural constructions. International Summer School of Semiotic and Structural Studies, Imatra, June 12, 2006), pleromatization stands in opposition to schematization, although the two notions are regarded as appearing in a semiotic symbiosis with each other. Us humans make meaning of our experiences, and our existence is a result of a combination of an overwhelming impression and a delineated generalization. Those two extremes constitute a dynamic movement in which the emotional nuances of our experiences and intellectual meaning merge.

The term “psychology” was applied for the first time in the 16th century. Yet the most interesting examples appeared in three different contexts. The Croatian poet and humanist Marko Marulić (ca. 1520), the German philosopher and Calvinist Johann Thomas Freig (1575), and the German Lutheran philosopher Rudolph Goclenius (1590). Marulić’s manuscript is likely lost, and neither of the other two defined the term. Even the interests of the three went apparently in different directions. Marulić focused on poetry and history, Freig on physica, and Goclenius on theological issues. Nevertheless, they had something in common, and this may represent the gate through which the ways they conceived the term can be understood. They all dealt with the soul, but also that it was a highly disputable concept and not uniformly understood. Another commonality was the avoidance or reinterpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy. The Florentines’ cultivation of Plato had influenced Marulić. Freig was a Ramist, thus, also a humanist who approached philosophical questions rhetorically. Goclenius belonged partly to the same movement. Consequently, they all shared a common interest in texts and language. This is just one, yet quite important aspect of the origin of psychology as a science. Thus, these text- and humanity-oriented aspects of psychology are traceable from the very beginning. This reaches a peak point when Alexander Baumgarten publishes his two volumes on aesthetics, as they were based on Christian Wolff’s Psychologia empirica (1732). They are also traceable in Kant’s critical phase, and even more in Wundt’s folkpsychology. Thus there is a more or less continuous line from the very first uses of the term psychology and some tendencies in social and cultural psychology. In other words, psychology is pursued along an historical line that ends up in the German, and not the British enlightenment.

This chapter looks more closely at how the movement of humanism evolved in the form of utopian ideas formulated by, for example, Francesco Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo. This alternative way of thinking was realized by cultivating literature, music, and art and also by developing alternative types of societies. The popular version of this alternative way of thinking, which was also motivated by economic conditions, resulted in riots in Europe. Similarly, the literary community that was initiated by the Medici family became an important manifestation of the aristocratic contribution to the development and spread of humanism. A focal point of philosophy during this period was Rodolphus Agricola’s critique of the Aristotelian logic, which facilitated a new understanding of Aristotle. This new understanding was pursued by several others, not the least by Philipp Melanchthon, who focused strongly on De Anima. According to him, De Anima focuses not only on cognition but also on human nature. Many historians have suggested that Melanchthon may have been the first to use the term “psychology,” although nobody has been able to prove this. Melanchthon was a humanist who had a very close relationship with the most prominent humanist, Desiderius Erasmus Rotterdamus. Melanchthon was, however, an even closer ally to Martin Luther.

This chapter focuses on psychological elements present in popular culture in the sixteenth century. The first phenomenon examined is the opera Rappresentatione de Anima et di Corpo, written by Emilio de’ Cavalieri (1550–1602). The opera deals with the battle between body and soul, and the characters in the opera are all the psychological forces participating in this battle. The second phenomenon examined is the history of laughter, of which Mikhail Bakhtin did a thorough investigation. In his study, Bakhtin concluded quite unequivocally that laughter represents the pure subjectivism. He summed up the cause and effect of laughter in what he called “the carnival,” which, in turn, represents the meeting place between the popular and the church parties. Laughter and pleasure are therefore also a meeting place between high and low and between authorities and the people. This manifested itself in philosophy in the form of, for example, Descartes’ using the first person in his meditations. In doing so, he allows the subject to form the basis of his entire philosophy, without fully embracing subjectivity. Thus, the conclusion is that popular culture had a long tradition for dealing with psychological factors, such as subjectivism and the experienced conflict between the body and the soul.

This chapter aims to show how the concept of the soul gradually emerged in the Greek language as popular knowledge of human nature. It demonstrates that the body and the spirit, and their relationship to the world, have constantly been a subject of reflection. The pre-Socratics elevated this reflection to an abstract level. But it was with Aristotle that the more popular understanding of the soul changed and gained specific philosophical content. This takes place when Aristotle shows how the soul can be the source of true knowledge. Hence, it is a basic claim and premise for this study that Aristotle has this clear purpose for writing his dissertation on the soul. There are two main arguments for this premise. He begins his dissertation by rejecting the pre-Socratics’ perceptions of the soul. Also, in his introduction, he states that the purpose of his dissertation is to find the source of true knowledge. The latter assumption makes this dissertation a philosophical project.

This chapter takes a close look at Martin Luther’s teachings in order to examine its relationship to psychology. Martin Luther was not the only one rebelling against the papacy and Catholic theology, but he conceivably had the greatest impact with his theological arguments. He brings about the theological turning point. In Catholic theology, faith and salvation were seen as objective dimensions, not controlled by the individual but by the Church. Luther fundamentally changed this by linking faith primarily to the individual’s subjective confession, admitting to having a sinful nature. This change is presented as a central argument for legitimizing subjectivity. According to this theology, although sinful nature is an objective reality, it is only when this sinful nature results in a subjective acknowledgment, that one can obtain salvation. Thus, this chapter argues that Protestantism reinforces the justification of subjectivity and also expresses a particular need to gain a deeper insight into human nature. This is how Melanchthon gains acceptance for his new and expanded understanding of Aristotle’s De Anima. This chapter also presents another crucial argument. When Luther claims that theology should relate only to the Bible and not to philosophy, emphasized by the slogan sola scriptura; this also has major implications for philosophy. Philosophy can no longer be based on theology. It must find a new foundation. The claim here is that the Reformation prevents philosophy from relying on theological teachings. This creates a vacuum in the foundation of philosophy, and this foundation must therefore be replaced.

This chapter focuses on Baruch de Spinoza’s “Thesis on the Correction of the Mind.” This thesis incorporates human nature and psychological factors as a basis for true philosophical understanding. This is another example of a philosopher who is trying to develop a foundation for philosophy but who is turning this foundation in an entirely new direction. He links philosophy to ethics, emotions, and body. His Jewish background indicates that not only Lutheran theology made philosophy secular in the seventeenth century. He does not shy away from using the term “God” in his philosophy, but he generally utilizes it in the same way as Aristotle. They both refer to an almost worldly God. Yet, contrary to what Aristotle claimed, Spinoza did not perceive God as the instigator. Rather, according to Spinoza, God embraces and includes everything. With this approach, Spinoza proposed a quite different understanding of relationships in the world but also on the human nature. There are no space for mechanistic explanations of the world or humans. With Spinoza’s emphasis on emotions as a basis for our cognition of the world, psychological factors formed a new basis for true philosophical knowledge.

This chapter analyzes what happened to metaphysics after the Reformation. It also traces the historical stages that metaphysics had gone through before the Reformation. Hence, this chapter goes back to Aristotle, who originated the term “metaphysics.” He assumed a secular foundation for all philosophy. Not until Thomas Aquinas’ writings was Aristotle’s metaphysics linked to theological teachings. Nevertheless, this link became so close and dominant that we still generally use the term “metaphysics” in this medieval sense. In the seventeenth century, there was generally limited use of the term, as it had been closely related to theology before Reformation. Yet, there were also some attempts to redefine the term and to give the term a new content. New terms were also developed, like ontology, cosmology, and psychology. A clear definition of metaphysics, which included these neologisms, was not formulated until Christian Wolff’s works in the eighteenth century. By including these neologisms, the content of metaphysics appeared as something completely different from the medieval understanding of it. With his definition of metaphysics, psychology explicitly intervened in philosophy.

It is not until Christian Wolff that the term psychology is explicitly given a central position in philosophy. He is also the one that redefines metaphysics and gives it a key role in philosophy again. Thus, Wolff represents a summary of the developments that had taken place since the concept of psychology was first used in the early sixteenth century. This chapter, therefore, suggests that Wolff might represent a kind of point zero in modern psychology. Since Edwin Boring’s history of psychology from the early twentieth century, Wilhelm Wundt and experimental psychology have been seen as the epitome of modern psychology. This position of psychology’s point zero quickly gives the impression that modernity entered psychology very late. This presentation attempts to show the opposite. By taking seriously how Wolff introduced psychology as an explicit aspect of a modern way of thinking, the advent of psychology is also linked to the emergence of modernity. This perspective on the relationship between psychology and modernity is a key reason for mentioning Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt often refers to Wolff, and Wolff must therefore be seen as a prerequisite for psychology becoming so central in the nineteenth century. Wolff’s writings became vital to most others who developed the field of psychology during the nineteenth century.

This chapter focuses on the effects of Wolff's philosophy in posterity. One of the most important facilitators of Wolff's thinking is his student Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Baumgarten’s metaphysics, which relies entirely on Wolff's metaphysics, formed a crucial starting point for Immanuel Kant’s teaching of metaphysics. It also became an underlying factor in shaping Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s goal was to eliminate psychology from metaphysics, thus rejecting one of the pillars of Wolff's philosophical system. He succeeded to such an extent that Wolff later became marginalized in regard to philosophy. Baumgarten’s concept of aesthetics represented a radical turn, as it was based on Wolff's Psychologia empirica. Wolff's emphasis on empirical psychology became a direct catalyst for empirical and experimental research, although this aspect has been even more overlooked. His students became influential researchers in their home countries during the Enlightenment era. The Russian and Norwegian pioneers Mikhail Lomonosov and Johan Ernst Gunnerus may count as examples. They all place major emphasis on empirical and experimental research with a direct reference to Wolff. They were all polymaths and asserted themselves in virtually all scientific fields. This becomes an important argument for psychology not originating from a particular science, neither historically nor substantively, but that psychology instead is a type of science that contributes to almost all the other sciences.

This chapter examines more in detail the British empiricists and their avoidance of the terms “metaphysics” and “psychology.” Nevertheless, they have the most eclectic writings with examples of how psychological factors replaced theological teachings as a basis for discussing true knowledge. In addition to linking philosophy closely to what we today call psychology, the British empiricists advocated for an important change in the understanding of so-called common sense (sensus comunis). It was no longer understood as an internal sense that unites all other sensory impressions, but as an expression of a common understanding among people. The British empiricists also linked psychological factors to a kind of popularism, which gives strong support to the claim that psychological knowledge is primarily rooted in popular wisdom. This culminates with Shaftesbury’s analysis of laughter, which to some extent anticipated Bakhtin’s analysis, but which saw laughter primarily as a means of reaching a common and unified understanding among people.

This chapter focuses on Leibniz’ understanding of the role of movement and dynamics. These aspects characterize human nature and our perception of the world. “Perception” forms a core concept in Leibniz’s philosophy. This creates movement and change and makes both humans and the world dynamic entities. Perception is also closely related to apperception, where consciousness is an active contributor in the processing of human’s sensory impressions. Both apperception and perception therefore become active characteristics of the individual. This dynamic view of humans and the world is reflected in Leibniz’ use of mathematics. This is quite different from the ancient Greeks’ use of mathematics. They focused on calculations as an argument for stability and equilibrium. Leibniz’ differential calculus captures motion and is therefore used to describe the world as we perceive it. Thus, Leibniz created a direct connection between psychological factors, nature, and mathematics. Newton had admittedly discovered this way of thinking at the same time as, or perhaps even first, but Leibniz followed through with the consequence that perception is also a dynamic entity. In addition, he sought to develop a new metaphysics that was based on this dynamic perspective of humans and the world.

The twentieth century went through a turmoil that produced crises in almost all the academic disciplines, but also in our civilization as such. In the 1980s, postmodernity appeared as one of the buzzwords that tried to rationalize some aspects of the turmoil. Many had problems with the term (like Lapoujade, this volume). This paper, however, pursues the crisis in psychology that Karl Buhler and Lev Vygotsky invited to discuss in the late 1920s. The aim is to examine what this crisis actually was about. A closer look at the appearance of psychology in philosophy in the eighteenth century demonstrates that rather philosophy instead of psychology went into a crisis. The objective aspects of medieval philosophy represented a kind of stability in the discipline. Yet, when psychology appeared as a part of metaphysics in the German Enlightenment, this stability was severely disturbed. The aspect of subjectivity that psychology introduced to philosophy created a crisis that provoked Immanuel Kant and forced him to develop his critical philosophy. Since then, subjectivity has been an accepted aspect of philosophy, but not with full agreement about how it should be understood. On this basis, Edmund Husserl talked about a crisis in European sciences in general. This paper, on the other hand, highlights the postmodern assumption, which says that the crisis is to be located in narratives produced by the sciences themselves. The broader the narratives are, the more they appear as self-contradictory. The more they pretend to explain, the more they fail to grasp the indeterminacy that is embedded in reality and actual life. As long as psychology is about the actual life, psychology is a science that can tell us about the crisis in narratives.

This qualitative research aims to understand the sociocultural complexity and social representations of cancer in the occupied Palestinian territory. The researcher conducted 16 in-depth semi-structured individual interviews with Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory, using thematic analysis as a methodology and social representation theory as the theatrical framework. The findings revealed three main themes. The first theme is social representations of cancer and cancer treatments divided into four subthemes: (1.1) manifestations of dilemmatic indeterminacy and vagueness. The second subtheme (1.2) refers to social representations of cancer in close proximity with death. The third subtheme (1.3) is constituted by metaphorical social representations of cancer, and the fourth (1.4) refers to social re-presentations of cancer. The second theme is the paradoxical social representations of cancer patients as divided into three subthemes: (2.1) pity-based societal responses, (2.2) manifestations of stigma, and (2.3) cancer rumors, a form of collective sense-making. The third theme, religious discourses and social representations of cancer, is divided into three subthemes: (3.1) cancer as predestined by the will of God, (3.2) cancer as a punishment or a trial, and (3.3) a spiritual journey of healing. The implications of this research suggest that social representations research can take a lead in promoting social and health change. The biomedical paradigm alone is failing in Palestine to encounter the sociocultural complexity connected to representations of cancer and its impact on future-health behaviors. Thus, stakeholders and policy-makers in Palestine need to build a mutual interaction between scientific encounters and lay thinking encounters. This requires building community-based health interventions and a sustainable health promotion programs to ensure higher penetration to the social outreach (families, hospital setting, clinics, and schools). To combat ill-health beliefs, stakeholders can benefit from utilization of community participation through creating space for dialogue and debate about cancer and its representations, which accordingly moving towards social and health change.

Musical terms like ‘polyphony’ are often applied in psychology and other disciplines in a more or less metaphorical way. However, this article investigates how polyphony can be applied in a non-metaphorical manner, i.e. in the same way, as it is understood in musicology. The fundamental hypothesis is that music represents a basic capacity of the human mind, and that this has impact on other human capacities, like language. If so, this should be traceable in different ways in different cultures. To investigate this, ‘implicit polyphony’ is launched as a term that refers to music, which is melodic, but at the same time reveals a more or less hidden polyphonic structure. This musical phenomenon is demonstrated by examples from Bach and Ravel. It is demonstrated that polyphony is at the core of music, not only in Western classical music, but also African and other ethnical music. Implicit polyphony defined as two voices condensed into one is also found in Norwegian Sámi music. The latter leads to a conclusion, which says that continuity in music is related to verticality. Investigations in linguistics show that the oral use of language is highly comparable with implicit polyphony in music. The same is modernistic literature where the aim has been to turn language into music, as in parts of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. By bringing in examples of lexical and conceptual blending, the final conclusion is that ‘implicit polyphony’ may serve as a tool for understanding the complexity in human thinking and culture.

Sven Hroar Klempe traces the concept of imagination in the history of philosophy and psychology, focusing on the period starting from the German enlightenment, and his chapter deals extensively with the works of a number of prominent scholars from the past three centuries such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Kant, and Carl Stumpf. Klempe discusses how the imagination of sound and music can be seen as a specific type of imagination, and he elucidates how sound and music provide an alternative understanding of imagination from that provided by language. This discussion focuses on the relationship between sensation and imagination and the complexity of sensory processes that music and sound can reflect in a way that language cannot.

One of the main problems in culture-oriented studies is related to a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, we aim to achieve a general understanding of the characteristics of a people, a country or a certain part of the world. On the other hand, cultural differences should also be traceable on a micro-level in terms of the culture in an organization, a group or a family. Most of the cross-cultural research ends up in the former trench, and fails to say anything about the latter. The Re.Cri.Re. project aims to unite these perspectives by applying two different approaches. After an analysis of the use of the semiological terms in-absentia and in-praesentia, this author concludes that the Re.Cri.Re. project tends to fall in the same trench as most of the cross-cultural research, quite simply because cultural meaning is still defined as generalized meaning. This paper argues that the cultural meaning has to be defined as particularized meaning.

According to the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, “political struggle proper is not a rational debate between multiple interests, but simultaneously, the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner” (Slavo Zizek, “The Lesson of Ranciere”, p. 69 ff.). This statement formulates in many ways the core of the aesthetic question when irrationality is mixed up with rationality, enjoyment with shock, and appreciations with aversions. These combinations point directly to Kant’s discussions about the relationship between beauty and the sublime, but they also summarize differences in the understanding of aesthetical problems throughout history. This presentation investigates the aesthetical problem from the two perspectives of psychology and music. The former represents a basis for how to approach aesthetical phenomena, both from a historical and a systematic perspective. Yet, some aspects of Western musical history may demonstrate how the aesthetical phenomena may act, and challenge our understanding of how the perceiving process actually functions. On this basis, this chapter goes into more detail in an attempt to develop a basis for an aesthetical distribution.

This paper questions to what extent borders are to be understood from a philosophical or a psychological perspective. This is done by investigating the distinction between philosophy and psychology that comes up as a result of Immanuel Kant's investigation of the pure reason. Ontology is found as a demarcation criterion between the two fields in the sense that it is of crucial importance in philosophy, but not of certain interest from a psychological point of view. An investigation of three assumptions in the perspective of affective loading follows this up, which confirms the efficiency of borders in psychological meaning production.

One of the big questions in psychology is when and how psychology disentangled from philosophy. Usually it is referred to the laboratory Wundt established in Leipzig in 1879 as the birth for psychology as an independent science. However this separation process can also be traced in other ways, like by focusing on how the two sciences approach and understand thinking. Although thinking and language were not included in the research in this laboratory, Wundt (1897) regarded thinking as the core of psychology. As a commentary to Papanicolaou (Integr Psychol Behav Sci doi:10.1007/s12124-014-9273-3, 2014), this paper investigates the differences in how psychology and philosophy conceptualized thinking in early Western modernity. Thus one of the findings is that the separation process between the two was more or less initiated by Immanuel Kant. By defining thinking in terms of the pure reason he excluded the psychological understanding of thinking because psychology basically defined thinking in terms of ideas derived from qualia and sensation. Another finding is that psychology itself has not completely realized the differences between the philosophical and the psychological understanding of thinking by having been influenced by Kant’s ideal of the pure reason. This may also explain some of the crises psychology went through during the twentieth century.

Music is close to language, and when we listen to music, we may also imagine certain events, stories, and the like. The differences, although obvious, are not so easy to detect. These subtle nuances are examined in this chapter with the aim of delineating the general traits of musical imagination. The author defines musical imagination in terms of a human act that provides a type of framework for cognition in which cognition and sensations are united in feelings. This also forms the basis for verticality, which is expressed in terms of musical polyphony. The multitude in musical polyphony opens up for a sort of community, which brings in a social dimension. As long as the social community forms the basis of cultural psychology, a thorough understanding of musical imagination may contribute to a more complete understanding of cultural psychology as well.

Subjectivity has always been a part of philosophical speculations. However, Immanuel Kant is mentioned as the main figure to bring in subjectivity in modern philosophy by comparing the Critique of Pure Reason with the Copernican revolution. We might include Descartes as well, and not least the followers of Kant, like Fichte and Hegel. Yet none of these end up with subjectivity as the only premise for thinking, but rather combine it with objectivity. Hence, subjectivity has appeared as a stranger in philosophy and yet not fully accepted. In this paper, I try to pursue the aspect of subjectivity by not looking at philosophy, but rather at psychology. The appearance of the term can be dated back to 1520 when the Croatian humanist Marcus Marulus published the thesis entitled “Psychology, the Nature of the Soul”. This thesis is lost, but by pursuing the appearance of the term, four different movements seem to contribute with and highlight an aspect of subjectivity. One is Humanism, the other is Reformation, the third is a focus on the empirical aspects of science and the fourth is the dissemination of folk culture to academics and aristocracy by means of the art of printing. The finding, therefore, is that psychology is not to be regarded as a discipline that grows out of philosophy, but rather as a discipline that conflicts philosophy, but nevertheless intervenes it and makes it progress.

The musicality of poetry and the poetics of music appeal to the boundaries of language to describe affective phenomena, as well as the interdependence between linguistic and musical systems in the mind. This chapter explores the implications of these interdependences, through the case study of the Norwegian composer Martin Myhre Olsen. The methodology combines poetic representations from an in-depth interview with the musician with the analysis of the musical scores he wrote to Emily Dickinson’s poems “Lost” and “Hope”. Both his biography and his compositions give account of notions such as tension and polyphony, key terms in contemporary cultural psychology, which are explored further from a theoretical perspective as well, in order to contribute to the understanding of feelings and emotions.