Eighteenth Century
- 1701 - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published the Law of Continuity, which he applied to psychology, becoming the first to postulate an unconscious mind; he also introduced the concept of threshold.
- 1710 - George Berkeley published Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, which claims that the outside world is composed solely of ideas.
- 1732 - Christian Wolff published Psychologia Empirica, followed in 1734 by Psychologia Rationalis, popularizing the term "psychology".
- 1739 - David Hume published A Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that all contents of mind are solely built from sense experiences.
- 1781 - Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason, rejecting Hume's extreme empiricism and proposing that there is more to knowledge than bare sense experience, distinguishing between "a posteriori" and "a priori" knowledge, the former being derived from perception, hence occurring after perception, and the latter being a property of thought, independent of experience and existing before experience.
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Psychology
Famous quotes related to eighteenth century:
“F.R. Leavis’s ‘eat up your broccoli’ approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)