Discover more about pychology’s ‘Key Thinkers’ throughout history.

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)

Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist who is most well-known for inventing pasteurization – a process to stop the bacterial contamination of wine and milk. In terms of the matters discussed in the text, our interest here is in how he helped defeat the notion of spontaneous generation.

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Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)

Hegel, as an idealist, believed that all that existed could not be perceived directly, but only accessible in our minds. Our minds have access to ideas of the world, such as images, perceptions and concepts. Hegel had to answer the difficult problem of how (if everything is in the mind), one can distinguish what is objective from what is subjective, and what is true from what is false.

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Alex B. Novikoff (1913–1987)

Novikoff was a cellular biologist who became a political activist during the 1930s and who joined the Communist Party in 1935. In the midsts of investigations into his Communist loyalities which culminated in his dismissal from the University of Vermont, Novikoff managed to publish two papers that embodied Marxist principles, framed within the context of what he referred to as the ‘concept of levels of integration,’ in the prestigious journal Science.

Novikoff proves an interesting example of how personal prejudices, especially uninformed prejudices, in this case against Marxism, can lead to rejection without understanding.  His papers on integration were chock full of Marxist principles but, since no mention was made of Marx, they were given a fair hearing and found to be of considerable scientific merit.

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Natural Selection: The Key Thinkers Involved

In Western history it was the 18^th century when evolutionary theories began to emerge. There was a difficulty for the evolutionists that would have to be confronted however – society was in the grips of prevailing religious beliefs that rejected the proposition …

The theory of natural selection – the proposition of mutualism involved in adaption of extinction – would go on to influence the ecologicial theory of perception and become the basis for a realist theory of perception.

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Aleksei N. Leontyev (1903–1979)

Leontyev was a member of what has been termed the ‘troika,’ along with Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria with whom he collaborated on the development of a Marxist psychology. Under Vygotsky’s leadership they established the cultural-historical approach to psychology.

In his independent work, Leontyev is known for activity theory. In developing activity theory, Leontiev was faced with the traditional binomial two-part scheme and the postulate of immediacy.

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Various books and papers of Leontyev are available at: http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/leontev/

Ecological Theory of Perception: The Key Thinkers Involved

During World War II, difficulties had been encountered in the flying of aircraft, particularly landing, and in the training of pilots. None of the tests performed were able to predict how well a student pilot would perform. The traditional theory of depth perception was not working; it failed to apply where it should have. The traditional theory – basing the visual perception of three dimensions on a two-dimensional structure – was wrong.

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Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988)

Tinbergen was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (1973), along with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, for their work in identifying the elicitation and organization of individual and social behavior patterns. Tinbergen was one of the founders of the science of ethology which studies the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. The emergence of this discipline brought considerable challenges to the assumption of the behaviorists that evolutionary adaptations could be ignored since, according to them, the laws of learning were the same for all species.

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Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936)

Pavlov was a physiologist, not a psychologist, who identified classical conditioning, a basic form of learning, due to his work on digestion. He first mentioned conditioned reflexes at an 1899 conference before the Society of Russian Doctors of St. Petersburg. The work attained international recognition in 1904 at his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

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Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967)

In dealing with the transition from biological evolution to cultural evolution, Vygotsky and Luria were particularly influenced by the work of Köhler on chimpanzees and their ability to solve complex problems. Their research resulted in an important finding with respect to an appreciation of the history behind the development of speech.

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Blind Sight

The phenomenon of blind-sight refers to the ability to respond appropriately to visual stimuli in the absence of conscious vision in patients with damage to the primary visual cortex, and it challenges the notion that perception depends upon conscious awareness.

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Lev S. Vygotsky (1896–1934)

Vygotsky’s  time in psychology was brief – a mere ten years, but I that short time he made considerable contributions to what is now known as the cultural historical approach to psychology

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Various books and papers of Vygotsky are available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/

Alexander R. Luria (1902–1977)

Although Luria gives much of the credit for his success to Vygotsky, he was an important figure in his own right, particularly in neuropsychology.

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Various books and papers of Vygotsky are available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/