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faculty
psychology. It is called this because it posits separate mechanisms—or
faculties—in the mind (or body) whose function it is to control different aspects
of human mentality. Faculty psychologies are contrasted with functional
psychologies, which explain different aspects of human mentality not by assign-
ing them to different mechanisms in the mind or brain but rather to different
ways in which a single organ of mentality functions.
Aristotle, and then various
thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century thinkers, wavered between these two views.
Recently, with the advent in cognitive psychology of modular theories of human
mentality, a modern descendant of Plato’s faculty psychology has come back into
fashion.
In the
Timaeus, which was written after the Republic, Plato returned to the
question of how to integrate the soul. However, this time he approached the
question through a curious creation myth, which for all its speculative flair
reveals a newfound physiological dimension to his empirical psychology. In this
myth, he began by noting that in creating order out of disorder, “God created in
each thing in relation to itself, and in all things in relation to each other, all the
measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive.” Prior to this divine
act, any order or proportion that occurred was an accident. Subsequently, order
was part of the scheme of things in which the universe is portrayed as “a single
animal comprehending in itself all other animals, mortal and immortal.” God’s
offspring, the demigods, were responsible for completing the design of mortal
And they, imitating him, received from him the immortal principle of the soul; and
around this they proceeded to fashion a mortal body, and made it to be the vehicle of
the soul and constructed within the body a soul of another nature which was mortal,
subject to terrible and irresistible affections—first of all, pleasure, the greatest incite-
ment to evil; then, pain, which deters from good; also rashness and fear, two fool-
ish counsellors, anger hard to be appeased, and hope easily led astray—these they
mingled with irrational sense and with all-daring love according to necessary laws,
and so framed man.
Fearing to pollute the divine in humankind any more than was necessary, the
demigods physically situated the immortal part of humans above the neck and
the mortal part below, placing the neck between them “to keep them apart.”