ABSTRACT
Sixteenth-century authors were responsible for introducing two of the key terms still used for the study of the soul and of human beings, namely ‘psychology’ and ‘anthropology.’ The first occurrence of the term ‘psychology’ is a catalogue reference to a work, now lost, by Marko Marulic (1450-1524), titled Psychology, on the Nature of the Human Soul, Book I (Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae liber I), supposedly written in about 1520 (Lapointe 1972). The first surviving work that uses the term is Johannes Thomas Freig’s (1543-1583) Logical and Ethical Questions (Quaestiones Logicae & Ethicae, 1574; Lamanna 2010: 301). And the first surviving work that uses the term in its title is Rudolf Göckel’s (1547-1628) Psychology, that is, on the Perfection of Man, his Soul, and in Particular on the Origin of the Latter (Ψυχολογια: hoc est: De hominis perfectione, animo, et in primis ortu hujus [. . .], 1590), the main topic of which is the origin of the human soul.
