Chiara Russo Krauss, "Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
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What is the historical background of psychology as a branch of philosophy?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Chiara Russo Krauss, a researcher at the University of Naples, Federico the Second. Her new book Wunt Avenarius and Scientific Psychology A Debate at the Turn of the twentieth century is just out from Palgrave Macmillan. At the start of the nineteenth century, the field that we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul.
How did psychology come to divine itself as a separate area of inquiry? And how did it become to be a science? In her new book, Russo Kraus considers the conceptual foundations of psychology as a science in the conflicting views of Wilhelm Wundt and Richard Avenarius, who Wundt established the first psychology lab, but continued to see psychology as a science of self observation, while the philosopher Avenarius embraced the emerging materialistic perspective in which the same physical methods that had just been successfully applied to explaining life could also be used to explain conscious experience. Brusel Kraus makes clear the major role that Avenarius plays in in the shaping of psychology into the science that it is today.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Chiara. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hello Carrie and thank you for having me. I'm uh looking forward to talking about your book on Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology. Um it's it's a really interesting look at one of the seminal debates, I guess, in the whole idea of separating psychology from philosophy, where it was once, as you put it, the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. But before we get into the book itself, um can you tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in philosophy and then how you came to write the book?
Yeah, my interest in philosophy is uh pretty easy to explain since uh I just uh got interested in philosophy when I was in high school. So I decided uh to study philosophy at the university and uh Then uh I got a PhD in philosophy and uh it's been uh my job uh since then, so and now I'm a researcher. And uh I always studied and worked in Naples, which uh I think it's uh pretty important for my education since uh Here in Naples we have a strong tradition in the history of philosophy. So I think I might say that I was trained as an historian of philosophy. So, my approach to philosophy is an historical approach.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the historical background of psychology as a branch of philosophy?
0:00–8:43
2
How did Wilhelm Wundt and Richard Avenarius define psychology as a science?
8:43–15:54
3
Why did the 19th‑century scientific revolution change the way psychology was studied?
15:54–24:19
4
What is the difference between the first‑person (introspective) and third‑person (experimental) perspectives in psychology?
24:19–32:09
5
How does Avenarius’s concept of ‘introjection’ resolve the problem of other‑minds and solipsism?
32:09–40:43
6
What are the implications of the Wundt‑Avenarius debate for contemporary philosophy of mind?
40:43–48:10
7
How does the debate inform current discussions on the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness?
48:10–56:00
8
What future research directions does Chiara Russo Krauss plan for the history of scientific psychology?
56:00–1:05:14
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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