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CHRISTOPHER D. GREEN, MARLENE SHORE, and THOMAS TEO (EDS.) The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19thCentury Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science Washington, DC: APA Books, 2001, 245 pages (ISBN 1-55798-776-9, US$39.95, Hardcover) Reviewed by DAVIDJ. MURRAY
In the following review, I have found it convenient to divide the 11 chapters of this volume into three groups, one devoted to the philosophy of psychological science, one devoted to theoretical and biological psychology, and one devoted to applied psychology.
The first of these groups contains chapters by Andrew S. Winston on Ernst Mach, by Charles W. Tolman on G. W. F Hegel, and by Thomas Teo on Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dilthey. Ernst Mach is well known to psychologists for his contributions to the theory of sensation. Hegel and Dilthey tend to be mere "names" to many psychologists, even to some historians of the discipline. Karl Marx is a name that can actually elicit groans from historians of psychology who really do believe in the Great Men and Women theory of the history of science.
But now that I have read the articles by Tolman and Teo, I know far more than before about where Hegel and Marx "fit in" in the history of psychology. But in order to explain what I mean, it is easiest if I first jump to the 1920s when Karl Buhler (1927/1978) wrote a book that included a division of psychological theories into two classes. First, there were theories that conceived of mental events and/or overt responses as being measurable in terms of duration and intensity in such a way as to render them suitable to be elements in a psychological calculus, much as physical events that take time and involve spatially extended objects can be the elements in a calculus of physics. The contents of mental events and the identities of the physical objects are peripheral, not central, issues in these theories. Second, there is a class of theory that conceives of the contents of mental events and the intentions underlying overt responses as being elements that are central, not peripheral, to such theories.
In the 19th century, the prototype of the first kind of theory was that of J. F. Herbart and, to a lesser extent, that of G. T....