Psychological Stage Development and the History of Philosophy

Abstract

Historians of philosophy often raised the question whether or not there has been a general trend or a general direction identifiable in the history of philosophy. D´Holbach, Hegel, Comte, Brunschvicq, Cassirer, and Piaget belong to the list of those scholars who tried to describe the history of philosophy as a history of stages of mind. They all described the history of philosophy as a sequence of stages going from more concrete, simple, and childish patterns to more elaborated, systematic, abstract, and mature patterns. Piaget himself made many comparisons between ancient philosophy on the one side and childish stages on the other side, while he identified higher psychological stages only in the sciences and philosophy after 1650. His idea with this regard, supported by T. Kuhn and A. Koyré, has found a couple of followers who likewise contributed to the psychogenetic theory of the philosophy´s history. The new structure-genetic theory programme, however, emphasizes that not only the philosophical theories but also the psychological structures of the philosophers themselves went through the stages developmental psychology has found out. This article here distinguishes six stages identifiable within the history of philosophy: Mythos, archaic philosophy, Ionian philosophy, classical Greek philosophy, early modern philosophy, and modern philosophy, all of them describable in terms of developmental psychology.