Medieval Psychology
•	Early concerns
•	St. Augustine
•	Aquinas and rediscovery of Aristotle
•	Problems of empiricism
•	Essentialism
Early Christianity & Psychology
•	All thinking dominated by Church
–	Had a corner on education
–	All thought dictated by religious concerns
•	Dominated by Plato and Stoics
•	Reason replaced by faith
–	Sensory knowledge seen as limited
–	God is unknowable
–	Hence faith becomes central
–	And motivation replaces cognitive concerns
Augustine (354-430) – General Concerns
•	Continued Plato’s emphasis on reason, but with limits
•	Concerned with universality
–	Stoic influence
–	Commonality comes from participation in divine
–	Thus eliminating issue of obvious differences
•	Interior sense and faith
Augustine’s Interior Sense
•	Interior sense grounded in faith and grace
•	How to account for evil
–	Either God does not control
–	Or is responsible for evil
•	Solution in notion of free will
–	Adopted Socratic notion that people who knew truth would do good
–	Hence evil results from ignorance
•	Ignorance does not result from lack of reason
•	Must lack interior sense which comes only from faith
Later Medieval Period
•	Rediscovery of Aristotle
•	Sense data more central
•	Nominalism
•	Essentialism
Rediscovery of Aristotle
•	Basically lost until rediscovery about 1000 from Arab sources
•	Obvious parallels with Christian thought
–	Final causes
–	Essential vs. accidental properties
•	Major figure was Aquinas 
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
•	Wrote a universal philosophy which incorporated Aristotle (The Phil9osopher)
•	Intellect begins with sense data
–	Could abstract general principles through reason
–	But guided by God because reason is limited
–	Hence God is no longer hostile to sensory data
Aquinas and Faith
•	There are fundamental limitations on cognitive abilities
–	Sense data are unreliable
–	And reason is limited
•	Faith is crucial
–	Knowledge of God allows correct abstractions and hence aids reason
–	And allows participation in divine and ethical principles
Problems with Sense Data
•	British empiricist tradition
–	Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253)
–	Roger Bacon (1214-1294)
–	Duns Scotus (1265-1308)
–	William of Ockham (1284-1350)
•	More important as Medieval period advances
•	Two basic issues
–	Nominalism
–	Essentialism
Nominalism
•	We form abstract categories from sense data 
–	Plato’s Forms vs. Aristotle’s categories
–	How real are these abstractions
•	The realist position is that they are real 
–	God creates
–	And individual exemplars created through his handiwork
•	The nominalist position
–	Linguistic realities
–	No larger, God-given realities
William of Ockham
•	Nominalist and hence extreme empiricist
•	Other importance
–	Ockham’s razor
–	First since Aristotle to take a psychological perspective
–	Experience and habit
•	Nearly excommunicated for views
Essentialism
•	Categories have an essence
–	Realist position
–	Essence identified with final cause
–	More generally with purpose – often God’s purpose
•	Distinction between essential and accidental properties.
Legacy of medieval period
•	Wrestled with issues we no longer see as major
•	Provided ways of thinking that subsequent generations tried to overcome
–	Schoolmen 
–	Essentialism
–	Lack of interest in empirical data