Thomas L. Spalding - The Human Person: What Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas Offer Modern Psychology

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This book is something of an oddityit is the outcome of a collaboration among two cognitive psychologists, a clinical psychologist, and a philosopher (an unusual grouping by pretty much anyones standards) trying to come to a common understanding of how psychology as a discipline can be unified such that the discipline provides a full picture of the human. Each of us, on their own and for their own reasons, had become interested in the philosophical tradition associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (and others), not just as an historical school to be studied, but as a living philosophical approach that could be applied to particular questions and issues in psychology. As we each, and in various combinations, worked on such particular questions, it seemed (to each of us) that the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition offered much that we felt was missing in modern psychology more generally. Writing this book has only reinforced our belief that A-T philosophy does indeed have much to offer, but also that psychology has much to offer in further developing a living, contemporary, A-T philosophy.

Given the nature of our main claim (i.e., that psychology would benefit by taking A-T philosophy seriously), it is inevitable that the book would appear, in some sense, highly critical of modern psychology. But, we are far from the first to note the general lack of unity in psychology and the weaknesses to which this lack of unity gives rise. Indeed, these critiques around the lack of unity in psychology arise every few years, with greater or lesser angst, and have from the very early years of the discipline. The critique has rarely been followed by any action toward more unity. In our view, the problem is that the critiques, important as they are, are often too focused on psychology, whereas we believe that the more fundamental problem is that the disunity in psychology arises out of conflicting philosophical underpinnings in different areas of the discipline. In addition, unlike some historical attempts at unifying psychology, we have been very careful about two issues. The first is that much of the day-to-day work of psychologists is relatively insulated from the philosophical underpinnings of the field. As such, most empirical psychological work is not impugned by our critique. Second, we have been at great pains to try to be clear that, in our view, unifying psychology at a philosophical level (making use of A-T concepts) extends to all areas of psychology: We are not interested in ruling out any area of psychology. We are particularly interested in avoiding many of the science vs. not science arguments that have roiled psychology since its earliest days. We see A-T philosophy as offering the best basis for doing so.

We want to be clear that it is the potential that we see in a more unified psychology that is the main motivation of our work: If we did not believe in the importance of psychology as a discipline, we would not have bothered with writing this book. Our critique and proposal for unity is only worthwhile, in our own eyes, because we truly believe that psychologyall of psychologyholds real importance in the modern world. Failure to understand the truly human will be a failure to solve human problems.

We hope that many people will find this book of interest: Psychologists, whether academic or professional, philosophers of mind, philosophers interested in the A-T tradition, cognitive scientists, students of psychology or philosophy or of allied fields. With such a broad audience in mind, we have intentionally eschewed some of the more typical trappings of a philosophy or psychology monograph: We have used no footnotes and have kept our citations to a (relative) minimum. We do not pretend to have presented any area of psychological literature in detail, nor have we presented A-T ideas in anything like the level of detail that one would expect to find in a dedicated philosophy book. In addition, we have been highly selective in presenting aspects of both A-T philosophy and psychology: We do not pretend that we have laid out every area of psychology that could benefit from thinking about A-T philosophy, or every area of A-T philosophy that might have important application to psychology. Instead, we have tried to identify and show some possibilities for the next generation of scholars to develop, while trying to present the A-T tradition in just enough detail for even quite philosophically nave readers to understand and see the kinds of connections we believe exist. Indeed, every chapter here could probably be developed into a book in its own right. It is our hope that they will.

The authors are grateful to theJournal of Mind and Behaviorfor permission to use elements of Stedman, Kostelecky, Spalding, and Gagn (2017) in Chap.. The section A-T Cognition was adapted, in part, from the section The Aristotelean-Thomistic Philosophical Model, pp. 195200, in Stedman, J. M., Kostelecky, M., Spalding, T. L., & Gagn, C. L. (2017). Animal cognition: An Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective.