THOMAS HOBBES AND PSYCHOLOGY

BEGINNING OF THE END OR A FRESH NEW START?

Abstract

The presentation deals with how Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy puts an end to the traditional psychology of the faculties of the soul and to the idea of man as a rational being. Hobbes’s materialistic and physical principles leads to eventually to a conception of man as moved by passions and reason as an instrument to achieve the desired exit in obtaining all that it is desired: the new idea of happiness. After Hobbes there came psychoanalysis with its fee associations, behaviorism and positivism trying to imitate physical-mathematical sciences, with the Gestalt reaction. All this development has led to a psychology without philosophy, without fundaments, ignoring that philosophy is part of all true science.