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Faculty psychology views the mind as a collection of separate modules or faculties assigned to various mental tasks. The view is explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic Theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas. It is also present, though more implicitly, in Franz Joseph Gall's formulation of phrenology, the now-disreputable practice of measuring personality and sensory traits by estimating brain mass of organs on one's head to determine ways to improve faults. However, faculty psychology has been revived in Jerry Fodor's concept of modularity of mind, the supposition that different modules autonomously manage sensory input and other mental functions. == Historical change == It is debatable to what extent the continuous ''mention'' of faculties throughout the history of psychology should be taken to indicate a continuity of the term's meaning. In medieval writings, psychological faculties were often intimately related to metaphysically-loaded conceptions of ''forces,'' particularly to Aristotle's notion of an efficient cause. This is the view of faculties which is explicit in the works of Thomas Aquinas: By the 19th century, the founders of Experimental Psychology had a very different view of faculties. In this period, Introspection was well-regarded by many as one tool among others for the investigation of mental life. In his ''Principles of Physiological Psychology,'' Wilhelm Wundt insisted that faculties were nothing but descriptive class-concepts, meant to denote classes of mental events which could be discerned in introspection, but which never actually appeared in isolation. He took caution in insisting that older, metaphysical conceptions of faculties must be guarded against, and that the scientist's tasks of classification and explanation must be kept distinct: It was in this and the ensuing period that faculty psychology came to be sharply distinguished from the act psychology promoted by Franz Brentano -- whereas the two are barely distinguished in Aquinas, for example. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「faculty psychology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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