Background
Ribot, Théodule Armand was born in 1839 in Guingamp, France.
Ribot, Théodule Armand was born in 1839 in Guingamp, France.
Professor, Sorbonne. 1885-1888. Director of the Psychology laboratory. Collège de France, 1888.
Founded and edited the Revue Philosophique de la
France et de l'Étranger: elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales, 1899.
Ribot’s professional career was centred mainly on psychology, but he fully realized from the outset that his positivist approach to psychology implied a philosophical theory of mind. He stated that the study of the mind was not to be thought of as falling within the province of metaphysics, but that it formed the subject matter of an empirical enquiry with a physiological and not a wholly introspective basis. In his earlier publications Ribot concentrated on abnormal psychology. From a review of many clinical cases of mental diseases he declared himself to be against the general theories of speculative psychology, which insisted that such phenomena as the will and the memory were always subject to the same analysis and explanation. Instead, he maintained that such terms as ‘memory’ and ‘will’ were simplistic labels for a complex set of phenomena not all explicable in the same way. In his later career Ribot’s field of enquiry changed to the investigation of normal psychological phenomena. His approach to such phenomena was reductionist, in that he maintained that ouremotional lives are ultimately reducible to our physiological states, whether or not we are conscious of them. Subconscious mental activity is to be traced back to various motor activities, and the emotions of sentient beings are due to their needs and desires, which in turn are due to their physiological organization. The sensibility of organisms evolved before their consciousness, and emotional life before the intellect. In Essai sur ¡’imagination créatrice (1900) Ribot attempted to discover rules by which the creative imagination works, and from which aesthetic judgements can be deduced.