Philosophy Stack Exchange
Philosophy Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [psychology]

Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviours.

Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviours. Psychology has the immediate goal of understanding individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases, and by many accounts it ultimately aims to benefit society. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioural, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behaviour, while also exploring the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie certain cognitive functions and behaviours.

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Is it a fallacy to say that a sane person cannot apply rational thought to the motivations of the insane?

A common argument in today's news is that: Someone commits a heinous crime by shooting a bunch of people. Anyone who commits a heinous crime must be insane. Sane people cannot apply rational thought to explain what motivates the insane. Therefore,…
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Rationality of Suicide?

I came across a story about a kid who committed suicide after carefully calculating the benefits of life and deciding it was not worth living. I am wondering if any philosopher has considered the rationality of suicide and wrote in great detail…
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Are we born with Kantian Categories?

Following this question; given that Kantian Categories are required to sythesise Concepts and for the conditions of experience; does this mean that we are born with them?
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What is the meaning of "meaning of life" and why do people seek it?

One of the oldest questions is "What is the meaning of life?". But what does the concept of "meaning of life" actually mean? What does it mean for something to be the "meaning of life"? And why is it so important for many people to have it? The…
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Can the act of having certain thoughts be unethical?

On the basis of Western morality, the Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian one, behaviors like killing, betraying, cursing are considered immoral. Christianity imposes that thoughts can be corrupt, therefore immoral; and there is logic, since thought…
user31740
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Dawkins on God: What are the strongest counters to his argument?

But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms...…
thinkingman
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Should philosophers care about the existence of emotions?

Cody Gray recently asked "Why should philosophers feel any different about the existence of emotions than they do about the color of the sky?" as a rhetoric question. But both physics and psychology were once subject matters of philosophy, so there…
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The eternal return, as thought experiment: what are the consequences?

Nietsche, as others before and after him (its roots, I am told, are in the West Asian tradition) , espoused the idea of an ever repeating clockwork universe, in which all lives are led over and over; each time identically. In choosing this view, one…
Tom Boardman
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Who is the Big Other, and is there a little Other?

Zizek often draws on Lacan term the Big Other; what is this and what does it mean? One supposes that there may also then be a little other - is this right? What would be sensible examples of either kind?
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How might studying philosophy impact your mental health?

According to wikipedia on Pessimism and Pragmatic Criticism ...Al-Ghazali and William James rejected their pessimism after suffering psychological, or even psychosomatic illness... Other authors such as Socrates, Diogenes, David Hume, William…
user22051
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Does self-awareness have a time span?

I recall as a young child that I didn't quite recognize that the "me" of tomorrow and the "me" of yesterday was quite the same as myself today. Once a punishment for a misdeed got delayed until tomorrow, which made me very happy; the next day the…
Michael
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What ethical studies have been performed on what would happen if a government raises kids without parents?

This is a thought experiment that deals with morality and ethics: Due to low natality governments decide to create schools in which kids are raised by professional caregivers and people trained to do so instead of parents. Those kids could be…
user22051
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How did philosophy react to empirical psychology when there have been disagreements?

The very first laboratory in psychology was developed by Wundt, a professor of philosophy, in late 1800s. And indeed the early psychology seemed very close to armchair philosophy. Freud's theories are good examples of that. It was really…
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What is morally wrong about altering someone's behavior using psychological conditioning techniques?

I am reading the novel A Clockwork Orange. The priest is very angry at the behavior-altering technique being used on criminals to make them "good" and feels as though it is not right to take away free will, even from a murderer. He also argues that…
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Is the Body without Organs a phase space? Or an image of the actual body?

Reading Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, I am unclear on the nature of the Body without Organs. Most literature seems to describe this body as a phase space in the mathematical sense of the term, i.e. as consisting of all possible configurations…
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