Sioux Falls Feminists endorse The Great Ideas of Psychology
for a thorough review of psychology's history
and the classical ideas it developed.
The Great Ideas of Psychology
Lectures by Professor Daniel N. Robinson
The Great Ideas of Psychology (1997) - 48 lectures, 24 hours
The Great Ideas of Psychology at TheGreatCourses.com
If you've ever wanted to delve more deeply into the mysteries of human emotion, perception, and cognition, and of why we do what we do, this course offers a superb place to start. As you hear these lectures, you hear the entire history of psychology unfold. And you learn that the subject most of us today associate with names like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and B. F. Skinner really began thousands of years earlier.
In the hands of Professor Daniel N. Robinson, this course roams far and wide, encompassing ideas, speculations, and point-blank moral questions that might just dismantle and rebuild everything you once thought you knew about psychology.
Witness the Debate over Psychology's Very Existence
In fact, you not only learn what psychology is, but even if it is, as Professor Robinson discusses the constantly shifting debate over the nature of psychology itself.
You see one school of thought after another enter the fray, trying to determine how this strange thing called the human "mind" is to be understood, studied, and treated:
- Are we an entity that simply perceives an external world and piles one experience upon another in order to learn?
- Could such a process even happen without an intervening rationality to make sense of it all?
- Or is "mind" itself merely an unobservable illusion, leaving the science of psychology with little more to study than the actual physical realities of body and brain?
It's a debate that has raged for centuries, and to take this course is to see the question and its implications with a new clarity.
Professor Daniel N. Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University. He has also taught at other universities, including Columbia and Princeton. Among the more than 40 distinguished books to his credit is An Intellectual History of Psychology. The former president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from its History of Psychology division.
48 Lectures - 30 minutes each
1: Defining the Subject |
25: Psychobiology - Nineteenth-Century Foundations |
2: Ancient Foundations - Greek Philosophers and Physicians |
26: Language and the Brain |
3: Minds Possessed - Witchery and the Search for Explanations |
27: Rationality, Problem-Solving, and Brain Function |
4: The Emergence of Modern Science - Locke's "Newtonian" Theory of Mind |
28: The "Emotional" Brain - The Limbic System |
5: Three Enduring "Isms" - Empiricism, Rationalism, Materialism |
29: Violence and the Brain |
6: Sensation and Perception |
30: Psychopathology - The Medical Model |
7: The Visual Process |
31: Artificial Intelligence and the Neurocognitive Revolution |
8: Hearing |
32: Is Artificial Intelligence "Intelligent"? |
9: Signal-Detection Theory |
33: What Makes an Event "Social"? |
10: Perceptual Constancies and Illusions |
34: Socialization - Darwin and the "Natural History" Method |
11: Learning and Memory: Associationism - Aristotle to Ebbinghaus |
35: Freud's Debt to Darwin |
12: Pavlov and the Conditioned Reflex |
36: Freud, Breuer, and the Theory of Repression |
13: Watson and American Behaviorism |
37: Freud's Theory of Psychosexual Development |
14: B.F. Skinner and Modern Behaviorism |
38: Critiques of Freudian Theory |
15: B.F. Skinner and the Engineering of Society |
39: What Is "Personality"? |
16: Language |
40: Obedience and Conformity |
17: The Integration of Experience |
41: Altruism |
18: Perception and Attention |
42: Prejudice and Self-Deception |
19: Cognitive "Maps," "Insight," and Animal Minds |
43: On Being Sane in Insane Places |
20: Memory Revisited - Mnemonics and Context |
44: Intelligence |
21: Piaget's Stage Theory of Cognitive Development |
45: Personality Traits and the Problem of Assessment |
22: The Development of Moral Reasoning |
46: Genetic Psychology and "The Bell Curve" |
23: Knowledge, Thinking, and Understanding |
47: Psychological and Biological Determinism |
24: Comprehending the World of Experience - Cognition Summarized |
48: Civic Development - Psychology, the Person, and the Polis |
The Great Ideas of Psychology
Lectures by Professor Daniel N. Robinson
Sioux Falls Feminists endorse The Great Ideas of Psychology
for a thorough review of psychology's history
and the classical ideas it developed.