Abstract
The article addresses two recently published books in General Psychology by Niels Engelsted and Jens Mammen. The two approaches offer in their own way solutions to the so-called ‘crisis of psychology’. Mammen’s new logical foundation for psychology is based on two different properties of the objects we relate to: those characterizing the objects appearances, and those characterizing the objects as unique substances or singulars distributed in time and space - the existence of the objects as opposed to the appearance of the objects. Engelsted makes a journey from Aristotle (384–322 BC) until today’s psychology in his quest to identify the domain of psychology. He places the psyche in the natural world as a result of locomotion in the first, most simple animal life. The domain of psychology includes intentionality, mind and consciousness.
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Notes
Qualitative identity refers to ‘quality’ as the properties of objects that are possible to sense (the appearance of the objects). Numerical identity refers to the question of whether it is the same or another object. If we combine the two kinds of identities, we can understand how a qualitatively altered object can be the same object whether it has changed or not (e.g. a person’s identity is the same, although the person has changed dramatically in his or her appearance).
Mammen’s axioms are these days discussed at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen
The reason why we think that we can identify objects by solely sensing them, is that we are not aware of that we or others already have selected and framed them in their numerical identities when we are sensing them as unique and concrete objects
Mammen states, that “These questions of the concrete and detailed emergence of the “human sense” as a specific elaborated form of the duality already found in animals’ life are not central. What is central is that after the introduction of the specific human duality in relations to the world of objects, a new structure is found in these relations” (Mammen 2017: 43)
This intentionality is in its first form not a ‘willing’ intentionality, but an ‘enactive’ (Bruner 1990) mode of intentionality inherent or immanent in the very locomotion as a ‘striving’ towards a future goal. An intentionality as something a subject wish to do is a later evolutionary developmental consequence of this original locomotorical intentionality.
Reaching out in space the animal is hereby forming a pattern of epistemic relations, the psycho-logic
According to Aristotle this course of events can be understood as a narrative, which has a beginning and an ending and ‘something in between’.
Dualisms can be seen as preliminary analytical and abstract expressions of aspects of reality, which can be dissolved in a dialectical, synthetic and concrete understanding of. the relationships.
An interesting aspect of the integration of the theories is, that Mammen’s theory about the objects’ dual properties is the world, which potential upcoming organisms will find, if or when they relate to the objects. That is, the theories in combination illustrate, how the world opens itself for the first animal organisms who open themselves to the world by their active relating to the objects’ dual properties. Elaborating on such considerations may contribute to a sort of basic phenomenology.
References
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All works of Jens Mammen and Niels Engelsted before 2015 can be downloaded freely from: http://engelsted.net/Indhold.htm
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Aboulafia, A.L.T., Dahl, M. Ground-Breaking Innovations in General Psychology. Integr. psych. behav. 53, 207–222 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-09493-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-09493-4