Beginnings of Western Psychology

Many of the Ancients' writings would have been lost had it not been for the efforts of the Christian, Jewish and Persian translators in the House of Wisdom, the House of Knowledge, and other such institutions, whose glosses and commentaries were later translated into Latin in the 2th century. However, it is not clear how these sources first came to be used during the Renaissance, and their influence on what would later emerge as the discipline of psychology is a topic of scholarly debate.

Etymology and early usage of word

The first use of the term "psychology" is often attributed to the German scholastic philosopher Rudolf Göckel (1547–1628, often known under the Latin form Rudolph Goclenius), who published the Psychologia hoc est de hominis perfectione, anima, ortu in Marburg in 1590. However, the term seems to have been used more than six decades earlier by the Croatian humanist Marko Marulić (1450–1524) in the title of his Latin treatise, Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae. Although the treatise itself has not been preserved, its title appears in a list of Marulic's works compiled by his younger contemporary, Franjo Bozicevic-Natalis in his "Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis" (Krstić, 1964). This, of course, may well not have been the very first usage, but it is the earliest documented use at present.

The term did not come into popular usage until the German idealist philosopher, Christian Wolff (1679–1754) used it in his Psychologia empirica and Psychologia rationalis (1732–1734). This distinction between empirical and rational psychology was picked up in Denis Diderot's (1713–1780) Encyclopedie (1751–1784) and was popularized in France by Maine de Biran (1766–1824). In England, the term "psychology" overtook "mental philosophy" in the middle of the 19th century, especially in the work of William Hamilton (1788–1856) (see Danziger, 1997, chap. 3).