Quick note to Brian: By 'psychology' I certainly didn't mean pop-psychology or new age psychology -- nor did I mean Freudian or Jungian psychology. I meant only to point to a particular field of study (the study of the human psyche -- emotions, intellect, sensations, beliefs, desires etc.) without making too many presuppositions about what the correct theory in psychology would be. Plato regards the virtues as "the health of the soul" -- and I agree with him. A study of virtue will then be a part of the study of the soul (psychology). That's all I had in mind. You may disagree with Plato on this, but surely he isn't a New Age thinker.
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Thanks, Chris, and of course you're right to extricate the term this way--I spoke too loosely--, but do you not think we should try to find another, then, given this one's absorbtion into 20th century pseudo-science?
And something else: I think, and argued at Cambridge (indeed, argued my way out of Cambridge thereby), that Plato's, and even the Master's ethics are floating on top of imagination, of an ultimately counterfactual vision of man, as begins and ends the Nichomachean Ethics for example, and thoroughly infects its critical definition of man early on (as in Book X's:"we must not, being human, think of human things, but must, insofar as we are able..."). Any such "study of virtue", then, will indeed reach down to some description of the essential contours of the human soul; but those contours, I would argue, are like a fence, shaped mostly from the <u>other</u> side, by the dreams of Pythagoras or Bach's music, for example.
And if that soul is sick, we must--somehow or other--get behind the fence to heal it. In other words, by the time Greek "psychology" had a soul to map, the dreaming had all been done (with Socrates the waking bridge).
I find philosophers oddly resistant to this seemingly obvious fact. But as long as they look to psychologists for their soul, I think they're bound to embarrass themselves.
(Psychology looks in a mirror and--surprise--always finds itself.)
On the other hand, when the soul is finally good and dead, there is no other side of that fence to alter its shape anymore; and then psychologists will finally get it right.
[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 16, 2004).]
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