Western Philosophy’s Concepts of Person and Paradigm Shifts

Abstract

Many philosophers have proposed various concepts of a person to describe how a scientist constructs his/her scientific microworld through research activities in the history of Western philosophy. This chapter first discussed the switch from Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom to Kant’s distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason; it then used Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Popper’s evolutional epistemology to illustrate the dramatic changes from positivism to postpositivism in terms of ontology, epistemology, methodology, as well as concepts of a person. Some epistemologies of postpositivism, especially Hempel’s logical empiricism and Kuhn’s scientific revolution, were emphasized to criticize the inductive approach of collecting idiosyncratic empirical data by naïve positivism and to highlight the importance of theoretical construction for the progress of indigenous psychology.