If Thales was the first of all the great Greek philosophers, Plato must remain the best known of all the Greeks. The original name of this Athenian aristocrat was Aristocles, but in his school days he received the nickname Platon (meaning "broad" ) because of his broad shoulders. (He is not the only great man to be known universally by a nickname. The Roman orator Cicero is another. )
The Armillary Sphere
A drawing of a demonstrational armillary sphere, from Libros del saber de astronomia del rey D. Alfonso X De Castilla.
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Very large image (1.6M).
Armillary spheres can be divided into two main categories: the observational armillary, as used by Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe; and the demonstrational instrument. Both types consist of a number of rings (Latin: armillae) which are arranged so as to model the circles of the celestial sphere. Typically, armillary spheres used for observation were larger and possessed fewer rings than those which served as demonstrational instruments; this made them more accurate and easier to use. Often the rings of demonstrational armillaries, like those of the observational spheres, were divided, and some incorporated sights which could be used to orient the instrument appropriately.
The Victorian biologist and early social philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great rival of Charles Darwin's. His theory of evolution preceded Darwin's own, but was soon overshadowed because of the absence of an effective theory of natural selection - although it was Spencer, and not Darwin, who popularized the term "evolution" itself and coined the now-ubiquitous phrase, "survival of the fittest". Although no longer influential in biology, his extension of his theory of evolution to psychology and sociology remains important. His "Social Darwinism" was particularly influential on early evolutionary economists such as Thorstein Veblen, but, more contemporaneously, it was adopted with gusto by American apologists such as William Graham Sumner and Simon Nelson Patten.
These web pages are the result of a project for Dr. Phillips's Psychology of Women class, Spring 1999. Originally these biographies of women in psychology were displayed as a bulletin board recognizing March as Women's History Month. When we searched the web and found almost no information on women in psychology, we decided to make it a resource that the world could share.
In chosing women to write about, we tried to include women of various races, ages, and sexual orientations. Some of these women are famous, some are not. Some are modern, and some are from the past. We feel they all share one trait, however: They are all remarkable women who have made an impact on psychology. We hope you enjoy reading about them.
When future historians turn to examine the major intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century, they will undoubtedly give a special place to the extraordinary achievements in biology, achievements that have revolutionized our understanding of life's processes and of disease. Important intimations of what was to happen in biology were already apparent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Darwin had delineated the evolution of animal species, Mendel had discovered some basic rules about inheritance, and Weissman, Roux, Driesch, de Vries, and other embryologists were beginning to decipher how an organism develops from a single cell. What was lacking at the end of the nineteenth century, however, was an overarching sense of how these bold advances were related to one another.
RETICULUM is a gateway to Internet resources for history and historians of basic, clinical, and behavioral neuroscience. Links to existing sites are reviewed for salience and accuracy, organized by topic for convenient access, and regularly tested for availability. Comments, questions, and additional resource suggestions and submissions are welcomed.
This site is dedicated to locating and reporting traces of the history of psychology throughout Europe. It is an outgrowth of several recent trips to Europe, during which I visited sites both well known and obscure. It occurred to me that an index to historical artifacts of psychology could enrich a visit to Europe, and help interested people locate some of the roots of our discipline.
The Linnaeus´ Garden is a reconstruction of Uppsala University Botanical Garden the way it looked during Linnaeus´ days.
The Uppsala University Botanical Garden, planted in 1653, is the oldest botanical garden in Sweden. In 1741, Carl Linnaeus was appointed professor of medicine at the University, and became responsible for what had become a run down garden. Linneaus' studies in the garden helped him to develop a system of nature for which he became famous. It was through the influence of Linnaeus that the garden developed into one of the foremost of its time. This website includes a brief history of the garden, information about seeing the garden and events at the garden, and a map accompanied by brief descriptions of various locations.
This site includes biographical profiles of people who have influenced the development of intelligence theory and testing, in-depth articles exploring current controversies related to human intelligence, and resources for teachers.
While Müller ended his life as the experimentalist, he did not start out as one. His second doctoral subject was experimental physics (taught by Wilhelm Weber), but his dissertation of 1873 and his habilitation of 1876 (Müller, 1878a) would today be book-length versions of a Psychological Review articles, since there is no original data in either one. In the Habilitation, he defined much of the standard psychophysics that has been passed down to students (Haupt, 1995); recommended using both ascending and descending methods of limits to limit bias and the method of constant stimuli, which he extensively developed with the Müller weights, would seem to be another method designed to improve the usefulness of a threshold, but he did not provide any new experimental data. In the early papers on memory by Müller and Schumann, he seems to have originated a number of important procedural controls for the study of association. Kroh (1935, p. 155) puts Müller in the same group (first generation of psychologists) with Stumpf and Külpe, for which the transition to being an experimentalist was a significant step; a step that was not required for anyone trained as a physicist (Fechner) or physiologist (Wundt).
