ABSTRACT
Scientific Materialism Behaviorism fits perfectly into the tradition of scientific materialism. The influential evolutionary biologist Jacques Loeb, mentioned briefly in Chapter 4 as a later representative of this point of view, in 1890 published some of his work on
tropistic, mechanical behavior in animals; in 1912 he published e Mechanistic Conception of Life, an outstanding restatement of scientific materialism in the tradition of Descartes and the French materialists. Then there were the objective Russian physiologists or “reflexologists,” particularly I. M. Sechenov (1829-1905), Ivan P. Pavlov (1849-1936), and Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927). As early as the 1860s, Sechenov was experimenting with reflexes and maintaining that the proper way to study psychological processes is via the physiological investigation of reflexes.
