Legacies of the Yale Report of 1828 in Liberal Education

The Yale Report was published in 1828 as a response to the rapid geographic, economic, and educational expansion in early, nineteenth-century America. The Report defined the purpose of collegiate liberal education as one that should ‘lay the foundation of superior education.’ According to the Report, this was to be best achieved by disciplining and grounding the mind on the faculty of psychology. In this process, the Report left both positive and negative legacies which have had long-term impacts on liberal education. The Report defined liberal education as one that provides general basic theories and principles. In addition, by stressing the importance of a ‘thorough education,’ the Report not only laid the basis for general education in later centuries, but also distinguished liberal education from professional, or vocational education, and the role and function of colleges accordingly. Moreover, the Report made a distinction between undergraduate and graduate studies. However, this distinction made it possible for liberal education to be downgraded into basic education for the study of concentrations. Meanwhile, the overemphasis on universal mental faculties which is content-neutral made it possible for non-liberal disciplines to be included within the curriculum of liberal education, which in turn would lower the status of liberal education. In addition, teacher-centered faculty psychology enabled the college as the guardian who took the parental responsibilities to enforce prescribed curriculum on their students. Moreover, faculty psychology also enabled liberal education to accommodate the new entrepreneurial and business demands of a rapidly changing society and thereby opened a way for neo-republicanism to be realized in America at that time. However, ironically, the discipline of the mind which was originally a tool and a skill for liberal education became its purpose since the notion of mental faculties was content-free as well as value-free. As a result, liberal education lacked virtues, values, moral⋅ethical ends, and public good. This undesirable phenomenon would give a grave lesson to the liberal education in current Korea enthralled by the notion of ‘core competencies.’

Introduction

This chapter describes the largest historical, theoretical, and methodological claims of Passion’s Fictions: that in the early modern period a rhetoric of the passions destabilized a received faculty psychology, only to be itself absorbed into new natural histories of the passions; that the concept of passion in the early modern period was crucially shaped by rhetoric, with its account of passion as a situated, worlded, object-oriented mode of cognition; that the rhetoric of the passions centered on an account of narrative as a mode of the knowledge of the passions in their world-bound particularity; that rhetoric also shaped emerging forms of literary production, from Shakespeare’s drama to the rise of the novel; and that literary studies needs to attend to the active role of its own material in the history of the psychology of the passions. The chapter also situates the arguments made in Passion’s Fictions with respect to a series of related areas of inquiry: the history of emotion; affect theory; cognitive cultural studies; the history of philosophy; and the history of science. Overall, it aims to show the intimate links between literature and the sciences of soul and mind through the whole period from 1500 to 1800, and it makes the case that literary history is a crucial territory for investigating changing ways of thinking about the passions, not just in the rarefied space of philosophical and scientific debate but also in broader areas of discourse and culture.

Passion’s Intentions

“Passion’s Intentions” provides a broad account of the concept of passion as the early modern period received it from various ancient and medieval sources. It starts with the rise of “treatises on the passions” in the seventeenth century, showing to what extent those books represent a new phenomenon but also anchoring their understanding of passion in a received “science of the soul”: a faculty psychology drawn largely from Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas. The chapter also connects that concept of passion to passages from the poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Donne and the plays of Shakespeare. But its primary aim is to emphasize the object-oriented, “intentional” nature of passion as the early modern period understood it: passion is directed at the world of things; it is intimately connected to the way those things appear to us, in what scholastic psychology called “intentions.” This also means that passion is not a purely internal state: while it is anchored in a structure of mental representations, it is also oriented to the world, shaped by situations, and must be understood with reference to those situations. As circumstanced encounters with qualitatively particular objects, the passions were seen to be infinite: knowledge of the passions comes from the outside in, through an immersive, open-ended, narrative understanding of particular lived situations. The chapter ends by briefly sketching how narrative, theorized by rhetoric as a mode of the knowledge of particulars, came to be seen as a crucial instrument of the knowledge of the passions.

PENYESUAIAN DIRI DAN STRES AKADEMIK MAHASISWA TAHUN PERTAMA

The purpose of the research to know the corelation between self adjustment and academic stress in first-year university students faculty psychology and cultural social science of Indonesian Islamic University. Researchers conducted data retrival using the academic stress scale and self adjustment scale. Respondents in this research were 170 first-year university students. From the result of a test of corellation it was found there is a significance correlation between self adjustment and academic stres (p<0,05) with value of siginificance p=0,000. The coeffficient correlation (r) of the test hypothesis is -0,569, which indicate a negative relationship between of theese two variabels. This means that if first year university students can adjust to the college environment it will reduce the perceived academic stress. Conversely, if first year university students s are less able to adjust to to the college environment, it will increase the academic pressure felt by first year students.Keywords: Academic stress, Self Adjustment, first-year university students

The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

Any account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: (i) for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. (ii) Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of faculty psychology is (iii) the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them.

Saving Faculty Psychology

The future of faculty psychology depends in no small part on the productive collaboration between neuroscience and psychology. The argument from multiple realization has posed a significant philosophical stumbling block to this quest in the past. Multiple realization should not be taken as an empirical given—establishing that a kind is multiply realizable takes a good deal of work, as Shapiro has been at pains to show; and even when the existence of an MR kind can be verified, the details of its implementation do not suddenly become irrelevant. Structure and function are two sides of the same coin. Thus the multiple realization argument provides no basis for neglecting the discoveries of neuroscience. Faculty psychology’s strength lies precisely in its willingness to work with neuroscience.

Phillipe Pinel and the foundations of modern psychiatric nosology

Phillipe Pinel (1745–1826) played a major role in the foundation of modern psychiatric nosology. Much of his contribution, historically contextualized within the enlightenment generally and post-Revolutionary France more specifically, can be summarized through five themes in his background, education and writings. First, he applied an inductive, enlightenment-informed natural science approach to classification adapted from the biological sciences, which he had studied, and applied this to large samples of mentally ill individuals in Parisian asylums, frequently referring to ‘varieties’ and ‘species’ of insanity. Second, Pinel's classificatory approach rejected metaphysical and highly speculative etiologic theories in favor of a Baconian inductive approach utilizing observational data. Third, Pinel advocated repeated assessments of patients over time, feasible given long in-patient stays. Fourth, trained in philosophy, Pinel relied on philosophically informed models of the mind and of insanity. Fifth, Pinel extensively utilized faculty psychology to understand and classify mental illness. He anticipated further developments of nineteenth-century psychiatric nosology by challenging the then-dominant intellectualist models of insanity, adopting a humanistic-informed emphasis on the importance of symptoms alongside signs, arguing that passions could be the primary cause of mental illness, and trying to infer causal inter-relationships in psychiatric patients between disturbances in affect and understanding.

Origins

After touching upon the conflicted reception of Fichte’s 1798 System of Ethics, this chapter explores Fichte’s early efforts to reconcile the needs of the heart with the demands of the understanding. The chapter then investigates the impact of Kant’s ethics on Fichte’s emerging philosophical position, focusing on Kant’s view of our higher and lower faculties of desire. Working through this material provides a background for understanding the path to Fichte’s System of Ethics, which ultimately rejects Kant’s faculty psychology. The alternative that Fichte proposes centers on his notion of an ‘original drive’ (Urtrieb), which he defines as our state of undivided wholeness. By way of conclusion, the chapter proposes that Fichte’s idea of an Urtrieb holds the key to rethinking his moral philosophy as an ethics of wholeness.

Darwin Meets the Curriculum

This chapter analyses the 1885 curricular debate between President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and President James McCosh of Princeton over the comparative merits of prescription and election in the undergraduate course. It contends that Eliot’s laissez-faire approach to higher learning possessed shortcomings, but that McCosh failed to unearth and expound on many of them. Wedded to a skills-based-education rationale based on the principles of faculty psychology, McCosh delivered a rebuke to Eliot that relied too much on mockery and innuendo. The chapter also stresses that McCosh’s defense of required Greek centered on outdated theological concerns The 1885 Eliot-McCosh debate thus amounted to a lost opportunity for supporters of the classical humanities. McCosh’s contentless apologetics for the ancient languages have much to teach proponents of the contemporary humanities in America.

Knowing and Willing in Freedom

Perkins’ basic understanding of human freedom drew on the resources of earlier English and continental Protestant thought, including the work of thinkers like Jerome Zanchi and Zacharias Ursinus. Early modern Reformed writers, whether of the Reformation or of the era of orthodoxy, were participants in a long history of conversation and debate over the nature of voluntary choice. This debate was rooted in theological treatments of grace and freedom extending back into the patristic era. Like the earlier English and continental Protestant thinkers, Perkins carefully worked through the traditional faculty psychology, in order to counter the accusation of Roman Catholic polemicists that Reformed theology utterly denied human freedom and responsibility. From the outset, Perkins’ approach rested on an analysis of the interrelationship of intellect and will, the creation of human beings in the image of God, and the relationship of human to divine willing.