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The term "psychologism' was first used extensively in the works of German logicians and philosophers of the late nineteenth century. It referred to a trend which had first emerged in the 1830s. This movement assigned to the science of psychology the role of assuring the foundations of the various philosophic disciplines, and especially of logic. After Hegel's death in 1831, the great systems of German idealism began to lose their appeal, and were gradually replaced by a new emphasis on an anthropological critique of reason. Although Kant's influence never died out in the German universities, it was not until the late 1860s that the movement of Neo-Kantianism emerged in full force. During the interval between 1830 and 1870, many attempts were made to base inquiry into the structure of mind on empirical observations, rather than on transcendental deductions of the Kantian type. For example, J.F. Fries attempted to derive Kant's a priori categories from self-observation, and Hermann Helmholtz traced the origin of concepts, numbers and classes to psychological, and even to physiological processes.¹ John Stuart Mill was often cited by these and later psychologistic authors as their most illustrious ally, because he claimed that philosophy's principal task is to conduct empirical inquiry into the workings of the mind, and explicitly described introspection as the only basis on which the axioms of mathematics and the principles of logic might be justified.²

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-1888-7_2

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