Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was born in Western Russia(Belorussia) in 1896. He graduated with law degree at Moscow University. After graduation, he started teaching at various institutions. Vygotsky's first big research project was in 1925 with his Psychology of Art. A few years later, he pursued a career as a psychologist working with Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev. Together, they began the Vygotskian approach to psychology. Vygotsky had no formal training in psychology but it showed that he was fascinated by it. After his death of tuberculosis in 1934, his ideas were repudiated by the government; however, his ideas were kept…

Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925, in the small town of Mundare in northern Alberta, Canada. He was educated in a small elementary school and high school in one, with minimal resources, yet a remarkable success rate. After high school, he worked for one summer filling holes on the Alaska Highway in the Yukon. He received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1949. He went on to the University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952. It was there that he came under the influence of the behaviorist tradition and learning…

Mary Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio, in December of 1913 (Biography, 2002). Ainsworth had two younger sisters and "a close-knit family" (O'Connell, 1983, 201). According to O'Connell, both of her parents graduated from Dickenson College. Her father earned a Master's degree in history. Ainsworth's mother taught for a while then started training to become a nurse, but was soon called home to care for her sick mother. Five years after her mother graduated, she married Ainsworth's father and became a homemaker. When Ainsworth was five, her father was transferred to a job in Canada working at a manufacturing firm,…

John Bowlby was born in 1907. He started his intellectual career at the university of Cambridge where he read medicine, upon the advice of his surgeon father.. In his third year of study, John Bowlby became drawn to what would later be known as developmental psychology, and he temporarily gave up plans for a medical career. After graduation he pursued his new-found interest through volunteer at two progressive schools, the second a small analytically-oriented residential institution that served about 24 maladjusted children, aged 4-18 years. Bowlby is modest about his actual work at the school: "I don't think I would…

Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896 in Neuchatel, Switzerland and died September 17, 1980. He was an influential experimenter and theorist in the field of developmental psychology and in the study of human intelligence. His father was devoted to his writings of medieval literature and the history of Neuchatel. Piaget learned from his father the value of systematic work, even in small matters. His mother was very intelligent, energetic, and kind, but had a rather neurotic temperament that made family life troublesome. Her mental health influenced his studies of psychology and he became interested in psychoanalysis and pathological…

1. Life John Locke was born at Wrington, a village in Somerset, on August 29, 1632. He was the son of a country solicitor and small landowner who, when the civil war broke out, served as a captain of horse in the parliamentary army. "I no sooner perceived myself in the world than I found myself in a storm," he wrote long afterwards, during the lull in the storm which followed the king's return. But political unrest does not seem to have seriously disturbed the course of his education. He entered Westminster school in 1646, and passed to Christ Church,…

a. Traditional Biography Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born to Isaac Rousseau and Suzanne Bernard in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His mother died only a few days later on July 7, and his only sibling, an older brother, ran away from home when Rousseau was still a child. Rousseau was therefore brought up mainly by his father, a clockmaker, with whom at an early age he read ancient Greek and Roman literature such as the Lives of Plutarch. His father got into a quarrel with a French captain, and at the risk of imprisonment, left Geneva for the rest of his…

This lecture tried to give a picture of the contemporary state of philosophy. Philosophy is in a state of disarray. It appears that academic philosophy really has nothing new to add to philosophy so like the sophists of old they deconstruct language and entertain folks with what seems like clever talk but in the end are really not saying anything that is slightly meaningful. Philosophy has moved on to psychology and psychology itself has reached the end of its tethers and the world awaits a new epistemology. THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS PSEUDO THINKERS Ozodi Thomas Osuji Some people build and some people…

This lecture reviewed the nature of existentialism and some existentialist writers. I am an existentialist, so, much of the material is drawn from my own experience, my phenomenology, hence is the most authentic in the series. EXISTENTIALIST THINKERS I have somewhere written that the twentieth century produced existentialist thinkers, psychologists and deconstructionist wannabe noise makers. In this lecture I will talk about existentialist's thinkers and in the next about deconstructionist wannabe noise makers. When you look at your existence what do you see? You see that when all is said and done that you are born, grow, age and die.…