Speaker
Andreas Rydberg (Uppsala University)
Title
An Analysis of the Concept of Experience in Wolffian Psychology
Abstract
It has commonly been claimed that psychology became a science in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was at this time that empirical or experimental psychology emerged. Although this kind of “new” psychology has been widely discussed, it has seldom been recognised that the concept of experience itself is subject to historical transformations. The following analysis is devoted to the concept of experience in the German eighteenth century philosopher Christian Wolff’s empirical psychology. At the core of the analysis lies the claim that Wolff’s empirical psychology to a large extent was caught between two conflicting ways of understanding experience. Drawing on Steven Shapin’s and Peter Dear’s theories about the notion of experience, I argue that Wolffian psychology was rooted in a scholastic conception of experience but that it at the same time strove to fulfill the demands put on a modern science.