Changes

|title=Why We Do the Things We Do: Psychology in a Nutshell

|author=Joel Levy

|date=September 2015

|isbn=9781782434122

Chalk and cheese; your left hand and your right; philosophy and psychology. All pairs have something closely resembling yet very different from the other, whether through colour and crumbliness, or physical form, or from being studies of the mind. The only thing is, one pair is alone. Your two hands formed at the same time, whereas chalk is the older, and philosophy predates psychology. The two were the same thing until recently, and we can perhaps point at a William James as the father of the split. I make this point because when I reviewed this volume's [[Why We Think the Things we Think: Philosophy in a Nutshell by Alain Stephen|sister book]] I found no timeline or history evident. Here, however, we do get one – travelling quickly from the ideas of idiocy-cum-possession in our early history, through phrenology and mesmerism to the birth of psychology. The fact that we then immediately look at free will in much the same terms as the philosophers does shows how common the disciplines still are – and how vital to our understanding of ourselves both topics remain.