The soul and its forms. Trendelenburg´s contribution to the birth of psychology as science

The present research intends to focus on the importance of the concepts of self, soul and subject within the German philosophical debate that around the first half of 1800 presides over the birth of psychology as science. The question concerning the importance of such concepts will be discussed as concerns both content and methodology, within the larger question related to the epistemological statute of psychology and to its demarcation and/or dependency with respect to philosophy. Such a question can be summed up as follows. Can psychology qualify as an independent science, exclusively relying on an empirical method and on the evidence given by the physiology of the sense organs, apart from the concept of soul? Or rather, has psychology to restore its relationship of filiation with philosophy in order to go beyond the theoretical impasses to which this methodological renunciation seems to condemn her irreparably? Within this general scenario, we aim to verify the incidence of the contribution offered by Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg to psychology as constituting an independent discipline, as well as his role as a mediating figure within this crucial passage. Above all, it must be underlined that Trendelenburg`s proposal is characterized both by an organic compenetration between psychology and metaphysics and by a redemption of the concept of soul, starting from Aristotle`s tradition and going in a direction opposite to that of Descartes, which culminates in the idealistic philosophies of the Subject and Self-consciousness. Trendelenburg tries introducing an empirical concept of the Subject in the broader context of a system with a more distinct metaphysical mark. In other terms, the theme of the soul and of human subjectivity is put back in the ground of an organic concept of the world, where the accent is placed on relations of interaction that the soul has with the multiple levels in which the reality is structured.