Welcome to psychology! You are invited to learn about one of life's most interesting subjects-yourself. You enrol1ed in this course knowing that it had something to do with people. But what exactly is psychology?
The earliest origins of psychology are in the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers about the nature of life, particularly the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle. who was born in 384 B.C., was interested in learning everything he could about the nature of life itself. He collected and dissected plants and animals in an attempt to see how their organs sustained life. He studied reproduction to see how life was re-created in each generation. and he studied the everyday actions of living people as they reasoned, remembered. and learned.
It was Aristotle's habit in his later years to discuss philosophy with his students as they stroled the covered walks of his schooL the Lyceum. Imagine what he might have said to them about the nature of life:
You'll understand what life is if you think about the act of dying. When I die, how will I be different from the way I am right now? In the first moments after death, my body will be scarcely different in physical terms than it was in the last seconds of life. but I will no longer move, no longer sense. nor speak. nor feel. nor care. It's these things that are life. At that moment. the psyche takes flight in the last breath.
Aristotle used the term psyche to refer to the essence of life. This term is translated from Greek to mean "mind," but it is closely linked in meaning to the word breath. Aristotle believed that psyche escaped in the last dying breath that was exhaled. Modern psychologists are interested in the same actions. thoughts. and feelings of human beings as Aristotle. Indeed. the term psychology comes from Aristotle's word psyche plus the Greek word logos, which means "the study of."
Aristotle received his training in philosophical methods from famous philosopher Plato, but he disagreed with Plato's belief that one could achieve a full understanding of anything simply by thinking about it. Aristotle felt that one must also observe the thing being studied-look at it. listen to it, touch it. Although he was not a scientist in the modern sense of the word, Aristotle's emphasis on observation is the basis for the methods of contemporary science. Progress in scientific methods from Aristotle to the present has involved no basic changes in this idea; scientists have only developed more precise and efficient ways of observing. Thus. Aristotle launched the study of life that eventually evolved into the modern science of psychology.
