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PSYC 3100 sec 01
History And Systems Of Psychology, Spring 2012
UConn Storrs Campus, MONT 303
MON WED FRI 3:00-3:50
Eric Lundquist

COURSE GRADES WILL APPEAR ON PEOPLESOFT LATER TODAY AS ANNOUNCED AT THE FINAL EXAM -- THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ANYONE'S GRADE AND NO ONE'S NAME HAS BEEN LEFT OFF MY LIST!
Course grades will also appear here on this web page within a week, listing all grades including quiz 2, the extra point, and the final exam, with the calculations that resulted in your course grade. Please save all questions about grading till that anouncement appears here, since it will answer all your questions!

FINAL EXAM REVIEW INFO
REVIEW SESSION TUESDAY 5/1/12, 5:00-6:30 PM, GENT 131
FINAL EXAM IS WEDNESDAY 5/2/12, 3:30-5:30 PM, MONT 303
(makeup times for those who've arranged it: THU 5/3, 1:00 PM, GENT 131, or FRI 5/4, 3:00 PM, BOUS 136)

QUIZ 2 IS POSTED HERE (as a web page) and also HERE (as a PDF file for printing).

QUIZ 2 INFO
READ IMMEDIATELY!... how to submit a question; bubble sheets; planned online posting date; planned due date; etc.

EXAM 1 RESULTS
EXAM 1 REVIEW INFO
EXAM 1 IS FRIDAY 3/30/12, MONT 303, 3:00-3:50 PM
REVIEW SESSION WEDNESDAY 3/28/12, 5:30-6:30 PM, BOUS 160 (TIME AND ROOM SUBJECT TO CHANGE!)

QUIZ 1 RESULTS
QUIZ 1 REVIEW INFO

READING:

1. REQUIRED: Hergenhahn, B.R. (2009). An Introduction to the History of Psychology (6th ed.). Wadsworth. (ISBN13: 978-0-495-50621-8
2. REQUIRED: On-Line Readings and Reserve Readings (to be announced)
3. OPTIONAL: Some classic papers in the Psychology of Learning - Here's a collection of links to papers I'll refer to in class - and a few of them may appear among the required readings for the class. Also see Classics In The History Of Psychology, if you're looking for extra stuff to read.

GRADING:

	Two Quizzes:	30%	approximately 5th and 12th weeks of class (Friday 2/17/12 and Friday 4/13/12) UPDATE: QUIZ 2 is a TAKE-HOME quiz that will be posted the weekend of 4/21/12 and will (most likely) be due on the last day of class; details to appear on web page.
	Midterm Exam:	35%	approximately 9th week of class (Friday 3/23/12) UPDATE: EXAM 1 has been moved to FRIDAY 3/30/12.
	Final Exam:	35%	WEDNESDAY MAY 2, 3:30 PM

For those purchasing the older Fifth Edition of Hergenhahn's text:
CLASS SYLLABUS for HERGENHAHN FIFTH EDITION from Spring 2009.

Stellarium is a free program that will simulate a planetarium on your computer so that you will always know what stars you're looking at and when something interesting will be appearing. It's quite addictive.

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

• Some excerpts from a paper on the Ecological view of scientific laws: quite challenging and probably only of interest to the most devoted students, though parts of it may well be fairly accessible. I would draw your attention to the general point being made, that animals moving about in their environments are in fact an instance of motion that science needs to consider, and that traditional scientific laws are quite inadequate for describing that motion, regardless of how successful they may be at accounting for planetary orbits and planning space shuttle flights. This suggests that the laws we have at present are only applicable to the special simple case of inanimate motion, and accounting for biological and psychological phenomena will require a more sophisticated view of what counts as a scientific law. To simply say there is no lawfulness in such phenomena would be lazy; but to say that what we know as "the" laws of nature today are all that there can be, and that lawfulness consists of simple deterministic causes and effects such as apply to inanimate motion, would be equally lazy.

• An excerpt from Beyond The Brain by Louise Barrett in which she offers an overview of Gibson's perspective, for those who want to read more. It's a pretty accessible description of some subtle ideas, and the section headed "The Environment as Illusion" reviews why the mainstream approach was so unsatisfactory to Gibson. In addition, this excerpt describes Turing machines and how they are an inappropriate model for cognitive processes (unless radically reinterpreted as mentioned in this chapter), and it introduces some cutting edge concepts of dynamical systems theory as applicable to psychology, in terms an interested general reader could understand.

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH THIS STUFF NEVER ENDS!!!

So You're Locked In a Room With Your Clone... what do you do? As you know if you were in class, the answer is quite rude, so only read this if you're up for some rudeness.

Spiders and turkeys and bears: some pictures from backyards (mine, my brother's). You're free to exclaim "oh my!" after reading the album title. Just something to look at if you're bored.

Some relevant quotes, capturing some insights into the nature of science and psychology. (Not all of it is immediately relevant at the beginning of the course.)

Various schools of thought in psychology which co-existed in the beginning decades of the field's history, and the implications of this situation for a history of psychology course.

Excerpt from Out Of Our Heads by Alva Noë: from an introductory chapter of a book by one of the few philosophers to question the seemingly fundamental notion that the mind is the product of the brain. It's important to understand that he doesn't promote any supernatural alternative, but rather argues that the basic concept needs to be reconsidered.

Related to the general topic of materialist views of the mind:

• Phrenological diagram in a more readable version, according to Franz Joseph Gall's disciple Johannes Spurzheim who increased the number of faculties from Gall's 27 to at least 35.
• Haskins Laboratories investigations of the neuroscience of reading: an article that I like both as an example of how reading is studied in the brain and what might be learned, and as an example of a critical view of that approach; note the comment from Michael Turvey, for instance, and the comparison of brain imaging to phrenology.
• Phineas Gage's story is related here, with admirable restraint, for those who want to read the details. But all the links make interesting browsing. Phineas's damaged skull and his tamping iron are displayed at the Warren Anatomical Museum of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; stop in sometime when you're in Boston. The story of the daguerreotype image identified in July 2009 is recounted here.
• Face-Reading story on CNN, 1998: Here's a transcript of a story that was broadcast on CNN in 1998 about the applications of something called "face-reading" in contemporary society. Is this any different than phrenology? Phrenology might have been MORE scientific, actually! Chilling, if you're about to look for a job... (And if you're thinking, well, that was a long time ago, just realize the idea was exactly as laughable then as it is now.
• Brain cartoon: a satire of overeagerness to find cortical locations for every trait and skill, and need I say this?... you do NOT need to know this picture for the exam!
  

Koole, S.L., Greenberg, J., & Pysczcynski, T. (2006). Introducing psychology to the science of the soul. Psychological Science, 15 (5), 212-216: This is a paper on finding meaning in life vs. the fear of death -- not very natural-science-oriented topics -- that nonetheless proposes future research directions involving cognitive neuroscience and PDP models (see p. 215); this makes the point that these are truly pervasive features of modern cognitive psychology. But I've only posted the paper here for those of you who may be interested.

• Excerpt from PBS program How Art Made The World featuring the work of Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg, in case you're curious about the approach described in the paper.
• Another excerpt from How Art Made The World showing experimental work on how the fear of death can influence people's behavior and political leanings. Some of it seems implausible but they have some intriguing results.
• Terror management theory in Wikipedia, an overview of some of the claims of the theory, providing some context and criticisms.

Connectionism / Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) / Neural Networks: a few milestones backward in time, showing that "new" is relative.

• PDP models are described here in an excerpt from a cognitive psychology textbook, at an introductory level. Note that the passage is concerned with connectionist models of the organization of memory and how concepts can be related to one another; but keep in mind that the approach is much more general and has been used to model language learning, perception, reading, and many other aspects of human information processing. Apart from their applications in psychology, it's likely that neural networks are being used to recognize your preferences when you use services like Pandora or Netflix, or to decide which emails you receive are probably spam.

Defining psychology as a natural science: four definitions of psychology; three important dates in the history of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology. (An expanded version of the epistemology section will be appear again later in the course.) Language Development: here are a couple of brief passages scanned from Erika Hoff's text that describe the Chomskyan view of language acquisition, along with an orientation to the perspectives of empiricism and nativism.

Some perspectives on the "fate" of Behavioristic Psychology:

• An overview of psychology's history from another textbook, which is too superficial for this class but I've posted it just in case you want a brief review. (Note, for instance, that "voluntarism" is conflated with "structuralism", and there's no mention of the imageless thought debate.)
• Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.
• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.
• Roddy Roediger's March 2004 commentary from the APS Observer, 17(3) re-examines the simplistic story about behaviorism's fate after the rise of cognitive psychology, shedding some important light. One nice point he makes is that Chomsky contributed a rationalist intellectual foundation to refuting Skinner's behaviorism, but mainly was arguing at cross-purposes with Skinner and maybe shouldn't be thought of as have fomented a revolution.
• Alferink, Larry (2005). Behaviorism Died Today, Again! The General Psychologist, 40(1) (Spring 2005), 7-9. This is a brief mention of some of the many ways, both scientific and practical, in which behaviorism is still thriving today, which should counter the cliché that it's a thing of the past.

Excerpt from an interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett (from Jonathan Miller's collection titled States Of Mind) on the strategy of investigating the workings of the brain by probing the information processing capacities of the mind, rather than approaching it directly through neuroscience. Note that this difference in investigational strategies is referred to as top-down vs. bottom-up, but in a different sense than cognitive psychologists usually mean.

Crimson by Josip Novakovich is a moving and disturbing short story that features this intriguing passage -- an insight that is certainly knowledge of a sort, but not scientific knowledge: "Milan thought how strange it was that he should be held responsible for the past, three years ago, when he was conscripted and enslaved--when he wasn't even himself. 'We all have multiple personalities,' he said. 'One of us is the past, and another the future, and there's no present me. We are vacant right now--spaces through which the past and the future disagree.'" Knowledge comes in many varieties, and whether it's scientific, or poetic, or spiritual, or intuitive, or common-sense, etc., all of these are valid ways of knowing the world for different purposes and contexts. Science is not the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge, or the ultimate arbiter of what is real for all purposes, but is a specially constructed tool for uncovering certain kinds of facts about nature using certain agreed-upon types of evidence.

Here are a couple of ways to get things really wrong, in viewing the relationship between science and religion:

• Cognitive Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in a commentary piece in Newsweek magazine that modern neuroscience has disproved the existence of the soul; responses from readers point out that no such scientific disproof is possible. Not stated explicitly is the fact that science is not the kind of inquiry that could ever be used to answer questions about the existence of souls or of God, and that deciding such questions is a matter of personal commitment that might then steer the type of inquiry you choose to pursue. See Lewontin's quote on materialism in science for a voice of reason.
• From a book on the "debate" over Intelligent Design: Intelligent Design is a euphemism for Biblical Creationism that atttempts to portray itself as science by supposing the "evidence" of the complexity of life leaves no possibility for its explanation in material terms, and that instead there must be a "designer" behind all of the complexity. That may sound like a plausible claim to some, but it's not a scientific one, since science only allows certain kinds of evidence and procedures to be used; science certainly doesn't throw up its hands and give up, and say "this is beyond us, so it all must have just been made by someone." If it all WAS made by someone, SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DISCOVER THAT FACT, and will keep banging its head against the evidence FOREVER, in a noble failed attempt to stick to its principles. But the issue is far from settled, and probably never will be. In this excerpt, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe (under "Conclusion") explicitly claims that science is not a game with arbitrary rules, when in fact that's exactly what it is -- well, not arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless, which exclude the kind of conclusion Behe wants to force. Break those rules, and it's no longer science that you're doing. Then there are a few pages by noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, who tries to undermine those rules of science (what he calls science's "methodological naturalism" or commitment to non-supernatural explanation), so you can get a taste of the style of argument; notice the footnote that I think shows the bankruptcy of his point of view: #31, which essentially says the thing for scientists to do is to try to solve problems for a while, then give up and say "God did it." Again, even if it's true that "God did it," that's NOT SCIENCE!
• A reflection on changing the meaning of words like "science," or in this passage, the word "art." It's from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard (author of things you've probably heard of like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare In Love and one spectacular thing you should check out, Arcadia, a mere hundred page play that could change how you look at the world). I should note that in this excerpt the character Carr's point of view is hardly the final word on the matter, though it is the reason I've posted this link.

Kant proposed three reasons why there could not be a science of the mind, but several 19th Century physiologists and early psychologists met each of those objections. For instance, Kant claimed psychology was impossible because: The mind wasn't a physical entity -- but then Helmholtz measured the speed of the nerve impulse and other aspects of the physical basis of thought. The mind could not be objectively observed since introspection was the only possible method and would always reveal the mind in the process of introspecting itself -- but then Donders invented the reaction time methodology which provided objective measures of the functioning of other minds. The mind could not be subjected to mathematical analysis -- but then Weber and Fechner came up with precise mathematical expressions that related the intensity of a physical stimulus (like light) to the magnitude of the subjective sensory impression it produced (perceived brightness).

PowerPoint slides on Early Psychology: some of psychology's 19th century precursors, followed by Wundt and voluntarism, Titchener and structuralism, the imageless thought debate with Kulpe, and Watson's turn to behaviorism -- all in very brief overview.

Irving Kirsch on 60 Minutes, 2/19/12: in this segment Kirsch (a UConn psychology professor from 1975 to 2004) discusses his research that suggests anti-depressant medications are no more effective than a placebo, i.e., they work through expectations and beliefs rather than chemical effects of the drugs. Other supportive or critical points of view are offered too. Here's a transcript if you're interested (this link wants me to print it but I just hit cancel). Kirsch's book summarizing his work is called The Emperor's New Drugs, a pretty short easy read if you want to know more about his view.

Notes On The Mind-Body Problem: I've summarized some information from Paul Churchland's Matter And Consciousness (Revised edition), and while there's a little more detail here than you need, it's better than the mere 1.5 pages (pp. 17-19) offered in Hergenhahn's Chapter 1. I've also added an outline and an explanation of exactly how Churchland's terminology differs from Hergenhahn's. (Depending on your browser, my nice numbered organization of the various positions might be very messed up, but you'll get the point.) PowerPoint slides on the Mind-Body Problem in text format

Where Am I?: a philosophical article (by Daniel Dennett) in the form of a short story, that highlights the links between the mind-body problem and the idea of personal identity.

A brief statement of the strangeness of quantum physics without a lot of explanation, in case you just want to see what's so strange.

• Famous physicists' statements about quantum mechanics, just to make the point that it really is strange.
• The double-slit experiment as described in a pretty good Wikipedia article; you can skip over the more complicated sections like the "Classical wave-optics formulation" and the "Path-integral formulation" and still get the gist of what's going on.
• A digression on quantum physics (featuring former President Clinton's grand jury testimony). After appreciating the irony in the quotations, follow the link to the simulation of the "two-hole experiment," and when that says "to be continued," be sure to click on the little picture of Einstein that says "how do we know this is true?"
• A well-done popular exposition of some of the phenomena of special relativity and quantum mechanics, from Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife. The book demonstrates the relevance of Claude Shannon's mathematical information theory (also very relevant and influential in cognitive psychology) to describing the cosmos. That may sound intimidating but if you stick with this two-chapter discussion, you will follow it all, and then you'll probably be inclined to buy the whole excellent book! Or, if it gets too thick for you, skim a bit till you alight on another section that catches your attention. (For instance, this is one of the few reasonable popular accounts I've seen concerning the physics of time-travel.)
• A warning against the wanton misinterpretation of quantum physics, from How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel. Like the rest of the book, it takes the form of an imaginary conversation between the author and his dog, so most of the examples have to do with dogs chasing squirrels or looking for treats. But it's surprisingly good, and mostly pretty easy to understand. This is an easy chapter because although it assumes you know some things that came earlier in the book, the only reason it cites them is to show that there are people out there talking gobbledygook and trying to pass it off as real science.
• Not Even Wrong is what scientists and mathematicians often say of something that is so devoid of sense that it's not worth serious discussion (following David Hume, actually -- see the last lines of this page). Here the phrase is used to describe the bologna-fest of a movie called "What The Bleep Do We Know?", whose web site I reluctantly link you to in hopes that you can spot its ridiculous features. The movie claims that quantum physics and contemporary neuropsychology support a new-age worldview in line with the teaching of J.Z. Knight, a woman whose body occasionally channels the spirit of the 35,000 year-old warrior spirit from Atlantis, "Ramtha" (who's not actually so clearly identified in the film -- you should google him/her though). If that sounds at all plausible to you, by all means pursue it with all your energies and devote your life to Ramtha... FYI, here are two basic points about quantum physics that the loony filmmakers completely ignore: 1) the theory applies to the smallest bits of matter at the subatomic level, and the strange phenomena that actually ARE part of the theory do not apply to physical events that we normally experience; and 2) although there are serious interpretations of quantum phenomena that suggest the consciousness of an observer or experiencer plays a role in converting unknowable potential events described only as probabilities into actual observable outcomes at the quantum level, no one has come close to suggesting that the observer has any effect on what those outcomes actually turn out to BE. The movie wants you to think that you can make anything happen in your life though, just by being aware of the possibilities. (In a less idiotic guise, that message might be helpful to some people, I suppose.)
• The filmmakers respond to their critics in this unintentionally hilarious "open letter to the media." They barely have a basic command of English grammar, never mind quantum mechanics. Sorry to be unkind but if they're going to flaunt their idiocy, I'll have to oblige them by pointing and laughing.
• Copenhagen, the play by Michael Frayn, is described here in Wikipedia, but there is no substitute for actually reading it (or seeing the film version starring Stephen Rea, of "V For Vendetta", and Daniel Craig, the current James Bond on screen). Finally someone who actually understands a bit about quantum mechanics applies it to human experience METAPHORICALLY, without getting all metaphysically insane! In particular, he makes use of complementarity (the need for alternate incompatible descriptions of the same event to capture it completely), uncertainty (the impossibility of pinning down all aspects of an event at once and having complete knowledge of it), and even the collapse of the quantum mechanical "wave function" (the active role of observation in deciding what an event actually was, instead of the traditional assumption that things happen and then observers can objectively record them). Frayn shows that the strangeness shouldn't be all that unfamiliar to us since we already see complementarity and uncertainty all around us, if we look for them the right way.

Interjections, an animated clip from the Schoolhouse Rock series: when you're happy or sad or frightened or mad or excited or glad, those words may just be shorthand for the relation between your situation and your observable behaviors.

ENIAC article in Wikipedia: a description of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, commonly (though perhaps controversially) considered to be the first electronic computer. The general History Of Computing Hardware article is pretty interesting too, if you just want to see a long chronology of the ancestors of your PC.

Two excerpts from Stephen Pinker's book How The Mind Works in which the Computational Theory of Mind is nicely described. Note that at one point, Pinker claims this theory is different from "the despised computer metaphor," which he suggests is the idea that the brain is exactly like a digital computer. But no one actually thinks that, and when people "despise" the computer metaphor, it actually is Pinker's own view that they mean. Pinker just wants to make it seem that no one could possibly have any reasonable objection to what he's saying. This is typical of Pinker, and part of the reason many people (including me) can't stand a lot of what he writes; another believer in the Computational Theory of Mind, the famous philosopher Jerry Fodor, found enough to disagree with in this book that he wrote his own book as a response, titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. These pages are an interesting read nonetheless.

Alan Turing's memorial -- note that it took almost half a century to appear.

• A statue passes a dog's Turing test: watch as this dog finds the seated figure to be a passable imitation of a human, and tries to interact with it accordingly.
• "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": Turing's 1950 paper in which he first made the analogy between minds and computers and proposed the "imitation game" now known as the Turing Test. Note that toward the end he says the evidence for E.S.P. is overwhelming and as such poses a counterargument to his theory of thought. That was an embarrassing bit of gullibility on his part, because such evidence is non-existent. (His 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers," which introduced the Turing Machine, is also linked here, but it's not so readable.)
• Cartoon tributes to Alan Turing: the Turing machine; the Turing test; and another mentioning the Turing test

PowerPoint slides on Philosophy of Science in text format A definition or characterization of "science" from Keith Stanovich's How To Think Straight About Psychology (a book that is much more valuable and interesting than its title might suggest; this excerpt is from the 8th edition of 2007 and it's currently in its 9th edition now). Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. For the moment, all you need focus on is the end of the first section where Logical Positivism, Popper, and Kuhn are mentioned, and the second section titled "A Brief Outline of Logical Positivism." Diagram of the logical positivist view of science from Leahey's History Of Psychology. Diagram of Kuhn's view of revolutionary change in science from Leahey's History Of Psychology.

The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell by William Blake, in Wikipedia: in case you were curious about this famous opposition of "reason" and "energy"; the major point for our purposes being that both are necessary, and when one side of an opposition is excessively dominating the other (as "reason" in the guise of the scientific materialist view was already doing in the late 18th century), it's reasonable to become a strong proponent of the other side as Blake did. For the whole work including integrated illustrations, see this page, noting the text of Plate 4 especially (amidst much else that admittedly only approaches being comprehensible). Blake is clearly against organized oppressive religion but the view that he's in favor of is not easily characterized as either religious or non-religious in conventional terms. (This version may be easier to read, but both have some misprints so try to use some sense while reading.)

PowerPoint slides from Thales to Democritus in text format.

Heisenberg on Heraclitus: a short paragraph in which one of the founders of quantum mechanics points out the analogy between Heraclitus's views and contemporary physics. From Werner Heisenberg (1958), Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science.

Das Rad (The Wheel): a 2003 Oscar nominee for best animated short film; its relation to Heraclitus's philosophy will be fairly clear.

• Shelley's poem Ozymandias in Wikipedia; it's a famous depiction of the arrogance of thinking you'll be around forever. You can read the whole article if you're interested, but at least read the poem. Interestingly the article also includes a parallel poem by a friend of Shelley's who was engaged in a friendly competition to tell the same story; his isn't as good, but it's not bad.
• The Wheel And The Maypole, XTC's final song from their final album, finds impermanence (of relationships, people, civilization, the entire universe) quite a freeing and even joyful thought, in an 80's-pop / ancient-pagan-ritual sort of way.

A concise statement on Parmenides from W.K.C.Guthrie (1950), The Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle.

Steve Martin reflects on philosophy and religion and other stuff, c. 1977.

Some Pythagoras links, for those who would be Pythagoreans if they could:

• Pythagoras in the BBC production "The Story Of 1", a program in which Terry Jones of Monty Python fame recounts the history of numbers - kind of silly as you'll see, but it makes its points accurately.
• Pythagoras on Wikipedia
• Pythagoras in the University Of St. Andrews History Of Mathematics Archive
• Pythagoras in a history of mathematics page at Texas A&M
• Leonardo DaVinci's drawing called the Vitruvian Man in Wikipedia; notice that Pythagoras is not mentioned at all, but the inspiration for the drawing and the architecture is clearly Pythagorean in spirit.
• Monument to Pythagoras in the harbor of Pythagoreio (formerly Tigani until 1955) on the Greek island of Samos.
• A Mathematician's Lament, linked at this blog, is really important to read if you DON'T like math and can't see why Pythagoras or anyone else would ever become fascinated by it. Basically this article explains that you've been damaged by our educational system.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension, an episode of the PBS series NOVA that explores the mathematics and applications of fractals in a very accessible and interesting way. The program has apparently expired from the PBS.org streaming site but can also be viewed on youtube. The segment from 8:02 to 10:10 is a nice capsule summary of how fractals describe nature differently than traditional mathematics.

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's play as described in Wikipedia. If you choose, you can read this entire synopsis including details of the plot, and it will not ruin the experience of reading the actual play -- which, I remind you, is quite a fast read and is available at libraries and could change how you look at the world. But if the synopsis bores you, don't let that put you off. You liked Shakespeare In Love, didn't you? Same author. Also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Travesties, mentioned above.

• Also consider this quite smart essay published on the eve of the play's first major revival in 1999 when it had firmly established itself: Is Tom Stoppard's Arcadia the greatest play of our age?.

Greek Philosophy through Aristotle, from Thomas Leahey's textbook on the history of psychology. It's a little more sophisticated than Hergenhahn's treatment so it may make for interesting reading; you don't have to study from it though!

Laughing Philosopher / Weeping Philosopher, by John Heath-Stubbs: Those are the traditional nicknames of Democritus and Heraclitus, referring to their respective attitudes toward their shared acknowledgement of the impermanence of the world. This poem is inspired by that difference, as described by Montaigne: "Democritus and Heraclitus were both philosophers; the former, finding our human circumstances so vain and ridiculous, never went out without a laughing or mocking look on his face: Heraclitus, feeling pity and compassion for these same circumstances of ours, wore an expression which was always sad, his eyes full of tears." (Montaigne, Essays, c. 1580)

Socrates is portrayed here in an excerpt from Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill. In just a few fun pages you get a character sketch, an example of his method of questioning (and why it was annoying), some mention of the nature of Plato's rendering of Socrates, and a note on his appeal to early Christianity due to the similiarities between him and Jesus.

• The Death Of Socrates as portrayed by Plato in his dialogue called Phaedo. The ending is the relevant portion, beginning around where it reads: "We will do our best, said Crito. But in what way would you have us bury you?" Someday you should probably get around to reading the whole thing, along with the first two dialogues in the sequence, Apology (the trial of Socrates) and Crito (Socrates in prison).
• The Death Of Socrates as portrayed by Steve Martin in a 1980 TV special, "Comedy Is Not Pretty." It's a really big file, 56 MB or so, so give it time. Totally worth the wait.
• I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood: A short essay from Newsweek magazine in which a philosopher tries to explain what it's like being a philosopher today. Naturally he cites Socrates as his inspiration.

My Day With The Sophists: Not really, but given the description of the Sophists I offered in class, this seems almost appropriate. What it really is, is my account of my day of jury duty back in September 2000, which I wrote down because a bunch of friends kept asking me to tell them about it. On re-reading it, I wonder whether I'm actually more of a sophist than the attorneys. (Please keep in mind what a nice person I am, so that you're not annoyed that I come across as so obnoxious, elitist, and generally snarky.)

PowerPoint slides from the Sophists to Aristotle in text format.

Some excerpts from Plato's Dialogues: They're very readable even in this classic translation from the 19th century. "Meno" features the slave boy demonstrating that he knows the Pythagorean Theorem (this version with illustrations may be easier to follow); Book VI of "Republic" describes the Divided Line; Book VII contains the Allegory Of The Cave. The excerpt from "Symposium" is Plato's famous discussion of the nature of love.

• XKCD takes the cave allegory literally though I suppose this actually has more to do with Descartes's epistemology than Platos's.
• Just for kicks, compare the excerpt from the Symposium with this excerpt from Hedwig And The Angry Inch (and for a limited time only, check out this video clip).

Ode On A Grecian Urn, by John Keats: This poem is a meditation on a very old Greek urn (a vase) decorated with pictures of life at the time it was made. It captures the Platonic theme of abstract eternal existence, of music and love for instance (note especially the second stanza), as well as Plato's notion of "The Good" (in the last few lines).

The School Of Athens, a fresco in the Vatican by Renaissance painter Raphael. This link helpfully allows you to click on the figures and identify them, but you may find other sites that additionally explain the significance of the figures' poses and activities. For instance, you will note the central positions of Plato, gesturing toward the heavens and the realm of the abstract ideal forms, and Aristotle, gesturing toward the natural world surrounding us which reveals itself to the careful observer. Maybe more important, though, is that links are provided to the major works of many of these philosophers so if you're interested, you can just click away.

The Wreck Of The John B is the 1958 popular recording of the folk song, performed by The Kingston Trio, and it does a decent job of using the Pythagorean basics to fill out a pleasant tune. Compare that to the much more famous recording by the Beach Boys called Sloop John B for a closer approach to a sort of Platonic ideal, in terms of building a richer, more exciting arrangement gradually, out of parts that are very well integrated. Notice the initial flute and bells, and the strange entry of the bass, and the later removal of the instruments to expose the vocals for a climactic phrase. It may sound dated because the equipment and techniques were cutting edge but it was 1966 after all. Hopefully you can hear past that to the underlying musical vision.

• Then if you want a more contemporary example of a Platonic ideal of a song, I recommend this.

This Too Shall Pass, a music video by OK Go which nicely illustrates Aristotle's concept of "efficient cause". There's also a live version that's worth watching (though I can't think of any obvious Aristotelian connection, if that's what you look for in a video.)

B.F.Skinner lecture excerpt 1 and B.F.Skinner lecture excerpt 2 in which he explicitly denies that the cause of behavior is to be found in the immediately preceding events and instead lies in the consequences or following events.

Excerpt from the film of The Name Of The Rose: I let this clip drag on too long so it's a large file, but once the bad monk catches on fire you can turn it off. Don't watch it if you plan to see the whole movie, or read the book.

• Tom Carson's article on The Simpsons: This 1999 column from Esquire Magazine is a good account of why the best social criticism on TV comes in the form of animated shows, and it may give you an inkling of what Western Civilization lost when we lost Aristotle's Poetics of Comedy (see Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose, pp. 567-583 paperback; pp. 466-479 hardcover). What if the comedic had been a recognized mode of formal discourse all these millenia? In some sense it has, of course, but those monks in the novel make some good arguments about how things might have turned out. (In this article, the most relevant section starts with the phrase "But only compared with other animated shows...")

Excerpt from Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach: a few subtly hilarious pages that take us through the history of scientific thought about how the soul gets into the body, from Aristotle to Descartes -- including the story of how sperm and egg were discovered when the first microscopes were turned toward... well, you know. Anything that begins, "There's a very good chance you underestimate the historic import of the sea urchin" is clearly right up my alley, and hopefully yours too. (Sorry the excerpt just leaves off... If you find this selection fun, don't go get the book -- instead, first read her debut Stiff about things that are done with human cadavers, which is high on my list of the most interesting and funniest things I've ever read.)

• Here's another excerpt from Spook that just happens to be online, in case you like it. It'll fill you in on that bit of folklore that says the soul weighs 21 grams since that's the weight you lose at the moment of death. (Hey, in case you don't read this, let me just add: that's not actually true!)

PowerPoint slides on epistemology: These are slightly more current than the Epistemology web page that summarizes them. The web page version, though, may be a useful reference for some of the technical terms that come up in lecture, as well as for the timeline along the top. NOTE: the "Rationalism vs. Empiricism" section lists five questions that distinguish the two approaches, and the last three of those are not specifically intended for PSYC 3100 -- so if you find them mystifying you can ignore them. The last of them may describe some familiar comparisons though.

Three ways Hume was really influential in psychology were: Hume said simple ideas could be built up into complex ideas through some simple laws of association, instead of depending on the mind playing an active role with its unexplained homunculus abilities. PDP models of information processing are based on applying a few generic rules to a large collection of simple processing units instead of depending on a program that executes an explicit set of instructions. Hume said all knowledge could be reduced to either matters of fact or observation (synthetic statements) or matters of the relations among ideas (analytic statements), and anything else didn't count as knowledge at all. Logical positivism was the philosophy of science in the 20th century that took that as its starting point and said science was the model for all knowledge; it was the most influential philosophy underlying behaviorism, affecting the kinds of theories that were developed and favoring the neglect of any role for the mind. Hume said that cause and effect couldn't be perceived with the senses and were merely the result of observing repeated contiguity between successive events, along with the unjustifiable assumption that the future will be like the past; therefore the best attitude toward science would be to stick to cataloging the observations and their typical sequences without proposing any underlying causal explanations of why things happen. The most influential behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, adopted much the same attitude by arguing against complicated theorizing in terms of physiology or cognition or other unobservable variables, and instead just cataloging the observed relationships between stimuli, responses, and reinforcements and punishments.

David Hume on causation, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) -- in case you want to see where questions about causality all began. (See also the famous conclusion.)

Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Note the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged. The diagram of the logical positivist view of science cited above may be useful to note here as well.

We're All Light is another track from XTC's final album Wasp Star (see also The Wheel And The Maypole above), in which they reflect on the fact that cosmologically speaking we're made of some ancient and profound stuff, and they then try to use that fact as a pickup line.