On Thinking About Nothing

Franz Brentano

The foundation of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology rests on three concepts: description, phenomenon, and intentionality. Rather than discussing awareness of the world as consciousness, he discusses intentionality. This means that consciousness is not a thing but an attention towards something. Intentionality reveals the paradox that we can think about the concept of nothing. When we think about nothing, “nothing” becomes an intentional concept. Intentionality is the directed awareness of a sensed stimulus (bottom-up processing in cognitive psychology terminology) or an imagined concept (top-down processing). Whereas early experimental psychology focused on the structure of consciousness as a measurable and observable object (Titchener’s structuralism), while Husserl’s phenomenology concentrated on awareness of some object or imagined concept.

A Phenomenological Exploration of a Bridge in Palmerton Pennsylvania

Matthew Giobbi, March 2024

Palmerton

Hardcover, Available at AMAZON

 I visited the neighborhood in Palmerton with my camera. Not far from the intersection the rail line cuts through the neighborhood, diagonally crossing the streets at roof level. Knowing Kline was captivated by the steel trestle of the railroad bridges, my eye too was captured by the lines and shapes. In fact, these railroad bridges are so characteristic that I would say they are a defining feature of the neighborhood in Palmerton and in nearby Weissport. Franz would have walked these bridges from Lehighton many times. 

Ways of Thinking: From Art to Social Science

I entered into psychology as many of us do; through the life-theorists. I call them life-theorist because they are not merely clinicians who treat the psychologically disturbed, but also, they think about our common experiences of living, and how to go about those experiences most effectively. They can also be called life philosophers because their interest is often less on acquiring facts and more on effective living. Most of us enter into psychology via our interest in Freud, Maslow, Jung, and others that have come to be called psychotherapists. For me psychology was never wholly about therapy and patients; it was more about living, life, and thinking; the psychology of the practitioner.

On the Thought Experiment Method in Psychology

*This blog post was originally published in 2013.

Thought experiments are a standard practice in physics, as they are in philosophy, but are curiously absent in academic psychology. Albert Einstein relied on thought experiments in developing the theories of specific and general relativity. In fact, most of the "hard" sciences are comfortable with entertaining thought experiments. However, academic psychology has a tradition of undervaluing the method in favor of quantifiable research. One would be hard-pressed to find a contemporary research paper in academic psychology that utilizes the method of thought experiment.

One criticism of research psychology that has gained considerable support recently is: there has been a lot of data collecting in psychology, but not a great deal of thinking about that data.  We tend to spend more time training our psychology students to use statistical packages for analyzing data, rather than to engage in penetrating and inspired thinking.

Erich Fromm & Media Psychology: Towards a Humanized Technology

1. Where are we Now?18th and 19th century industrialism


 We find Fromm describing a picture of where Western society has come from, since
the first Industrial Revolution, and where we are at (in the second Industrial
Revolution). The first Industrial Revolution, Fromm describes as a transfer of
energy sources from organic, animal and man energy sources, to mechanical,
steam electric, oil, and atomic, energy.

An Introduction to Media Psychology

What is media psychology? What do media psychologists do and how do they do it? What is the intention of the media psychologist as an individual, and media psychology as a discipline? These are the five questions that I would like to explore with you in this essay.

A good place to begin is by defining the words media and psychology. You have learned, no doubt, that the definition of psychology is “the scientific study of behavior and mental processes”. This definition of psychology is not the first, not the last, and not the only definition. In fact, this definition reflects the system of knowledge (called a paradigm) of one of the seven, contemporary systems of knowledge, or schools of thought of psychology; the cognitive paradigm. The cognitive revolution in psychology took place in the early 1960s against the prevailing behaviorist paradigm. From the early 1930s through the 1960s, introduction to psychology textbooks defined psychology as “the scientific study of behavior”. When computer scientists, linguists, and artificial intelligence researchers began treating the brain as a piece of computer hardware and the mind and thinking as software, the definition changed to include mental processes, which means cognition or thinking. It was said at this time that psychology had “regained consciousness,” after a forty-year period of classical and operant conditioning theories of behaviorism.