Abstract

If we accept philosophy as the search for knowledge about ourselves and the world around us by reasoning and we accept psychology as the use of science in the search for understanding the mind and behavior, we can get along without philosophy in our history courses very well. We can begin the history of psychology with the emergence of the life sciences in the early 1800s with passing kudos to the general emergence of science via Gallileo, Newton and Bacon. We can sanitize Fechner, Wundt, James and Dewey; ennoble Pavlov, Watson and Skinner; plunge into learning and psychobiology ; and end amidst computers and cognition. And remain unscathed and untouched by human reasoning and philosophy. Overall, from the perspective of a historian type, I am less and less certain about the present or the future without the sifting wisdom of history. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)