The first psychologism controversy: science, philosophy and "méthode psychologique" in early 19th

The first psychologism controversy: science, philosophy and "méthode psychologique" in early 19th

Ernesto Giusti

In this talk, the first controversy of psychologism, which occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth century, will be presented. The names of Victor Cousin, as a starting point, and Auguste Comte, as an arrival, chronologically delimit this dispute. However, it will be addressed mainly from the viewpoint of the arguments of Théodore Jouffroy, as a defender of the "psychologist" position, and of the doctor Victor Broussais, the first to popularize the term "Psychologism" and its most convinced nemesis. The first develops in a more consistent way the vague methodological theses of Cousin, while the second provides Comte with his standard position in the controversy. To this end, we will begin with a historical recovery of the development of French psychology in the early twentieth century, constituted by an eclectic amalgam of Condillac's sensualism, ideology and introspection. It will be argued that the controversy understands psychologism first and foremost as a psychological method, and by this, as a method of introspection. Thus, the central point of the dispute is what can be called "metaphysical psychologism", or the attempt to base the totality of philosophy on the method of internal observation of our mental contents or "facts of consciousness". Jouffroy, in particular, by making the soul a mere hypothesis, offers a more refined version of introspection in which it is freed from the residues of "Intellectual Intuition" that it still had in Cousin and becomes a phenomenology of the facts of consciousness. It concludes with an examination of the reception and, later, the forgetting of this controversy, which was nevertheless decisive for French philosophy of the nineteenth century and its entire subsequent identity.