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Vidal Fernando , The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology . Chicago and London : Chicago University Press , 2011. Pp. xiv+413. ISBN 978-0-226-85586-8 . £35.50 (hardback).
Amongst psychologists a widespread view holds that psychology emerged as a separate discipline in the final decades of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory of psychology at the University of Leipzig in 1879 playing a pivotal role. This view was energetically propounded by Edwin G. Boring of Harvard - author of a classic work on the history of experimental psychology originally published in 1929 - and has often been repeated since. Boring and other early historians of psychology were, of course, aware of diverse 'precursors' of psychology in physiology and (reaching much farther back, indeed at least to Aristotle) in philosophy. But events in the last decades of the nineteenth century have generally been held to mark a watershed in the emergence of a new discipline now recognized as psychology.
Fernando Vidal takes issue with this standard view of the history of psychology in this seminal book, a meticulous and highly erudite treatise on the emergence of a discipline going by the name of psychology one or two centuries before Wundt's establishment of his laboratory. With the demise of the Aristotelian world view the science of the soul, as expounded by Aristotle, gave...