Live Life Team
A lot of ancient writing could have been lost if not for the efforts made by the Islamic and Arab translators in the House of Knowledge, the House of Wisdom and similar institutions in which commentaries were then translated into Latin during the 12th century. Then again, it is not clear on how these sources first came to be used through the Renaissance, and their influence on what would emerge thereafter, since psychology’s discipline is a topic of scholarly debate.
The earliest use of the term “psychology” has often been attributed to Rudolf Göckel, a German scholastic philosopher who published ‘Yucologia hoc est de hominis perfectione, anima, ortu’ in 1590 in Marburg. Still, the term appears to have been used over six decades earlier by Marko Marulić, a Croatian humanist, in his Latin treatise which is entitled ‘Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae’. Even though the treatise itself had not been conserved, its title appeared to be on a list of Marulic’s works collected by his younger contemporary, Franjo Bozicevic-Natalis at his Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis. This certainly may not have been the first time it was used, however it is currently the first documented use.
Psychology did not become popular until Christian Wolff, a German idealist philosopher, used it in his ‘Psychologia rationalis’ and ‘Psychologia empirica’. Psychology was extensively regarded as a branch of philosophy up to the middle of the 19th century.
