Psychology As A Human Science

Introduction to Psychology as a Human Science gathers together the disparate pieces of the story of psychology as a human science and places this story into the broader history of science in general. The book explains how psychology as a human science is linked to, but distinctly different from, psychology as a natural science. Students first learn how science, knowledge, and truth have been framed since antiquity. Once they have become familiar with these concepts, they are ready to examine the development of science through the ages and see how psychology drew from this development. They study the approaches of Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as existential, humanistic, and transpersonal psychology. The book also includes a chapter on social constructionism, and concludes by revisiting some of its framing questions, such as how best to study human beings, and what it may mean to characterize psychology as a science. Introduction to Psychology as a Human Science responds to three linked questions. How does each of the approaches view human beings? What are the scientific assumptions of each approach, given their view of human beings? What are the scientific methods and procedures through which each approach gathers knowledge? Intelligent and thought-provoking, the text is a unique choice for introductory psychology courses including those that emphasize research methods.

Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based Approach is a classic text in the field of psychology that is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1970. Giorgi's text helped establish the philosophical foundation humanistic psychology and the human science approach. He provides an important critique of traditional methods in psychology while providing his alternative. This new version includes a new introduction by Giorgi along with a new Foreword by Rodger Broomé.

This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world – here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultural psychology as the science of specifically human ways of existence. It comes as a next step after the “behaviorist turn” that has dominated psychology over most of the 20th century, and like its successor in the form of “cognitivism”, kept psychology away from addressing issues of specifically human ways of relating with their worlds. Such linking takes place through intentional human actions: through the creation of complex tools for living, entertainment, and work. Human beings construct tools to make other tools. Human beings invent religious systems, notions of economic rationality and legal systems; they enter into aesthetic enjoyment of various aspects of life in art, music, and literature; they have the capability of inventing national identities that can be summoned to legitimate one’s killing of one’s neighbors or being killed oneself. The contributions to this volume focus on the central goal of demonstrating that psychology as a science needs to start from the phenomena of higher psychological functions and then look at how their lower counterparts are re-organized from above. That kind of investigation is inevitably interdisciplinary - it links psychology with anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history and developmental biology. Various contributions to this volume are based on the work of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Henri Bergson and on traditions of Ganzheitspsychologie and Gestalt psychology. Psychology as the Science of Human Being is a valuable resource to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, biologists and anthropologists alike.​

"Provides a critical and historical introduction to the core themes and influential thinkers that helped to shape contemporary human science approaches to psychotherapy"--Provided by publisher.

Advocates a perspective rooted in human experience to discuss issues such as empathy, sexual assault, the natural environment

The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of human nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference.

For some two centuries, scholars have wrestled with questions regarding the nature and logic of history as a discipline and, more broadly, with the entire complex of the "human sciences, " with include theology, philosophy, history, literature, the fine arts, and languages. The fundamental issue is whether the human sciences are a special class of studies with a specifically distinct object and method or whether they must be subsumed under the natural sciences. German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey dedicated the bulk of his long career to there and related questions. His Introduction to the Human Sciences is a pioneering effort to elaborate a general theory of the human sciences, especially history, and to distinguish these sciences radically from the field of natural sciences. Though the Introduction was never completed, it remains one of the major statements of the topic. Together with other works by Dilthey, it has had a substantial influence on the recognition and human sciences as a fundamental division of human knowledge and on their separation from the natural sciences in origin, nature, and method. As a contribution to the issue of the methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, the Introduction rightly claims a place. This is the first time the entire work is available in English. In his introductory essay, translator Ramon J. Betanzos surveys Dilthey's life and thought and hails his efforts to create a foundational science for the particular human sciences, and at the same time, takes serious issue with Dilthey's historical/critical evaluation of metaphysics.