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The institution in 1880 of a laboratory of experimental psychology in the San Lazzaro Mental Hospital of Reggio Emilia, directed by Augusto Tamburini, marks a fundamental stage for the birth of scientific psychology in Italy. It was in this laboratory that the Sicilian psychiatrist Gabriele Buccola worked, carrying out reaction-time experiments in a broad and systematic way on "sane" and mentally ill individuals. In so doing, he was following Claude Bernard's lesson--which was advocated also by Comte, Taine, and Ribot, as in Italy by Livi and Tamburini-- according to which mental functions are to be studied in both normal and pathological conditions. With these experiments, Buccola highlighted the way in which reaction time is tied to "attention," how it is altered by mental illness, and how there are various "modifiers" that influence the results. He also shows how the measurement of this "time" represents an important instrument for the differential diagnosis of several mental pathologies. Buccola's work, which is implemented in the first volume of experimental psychology written in Italy, demonstrates how psychology, which in the second half of the nineteenth century aspired to become an autonomous science, developed in Italy from the root of psychiatry, on the common ground of evolutionary positivism.

Sante De Sanctis, a psychiatrist and psychologist, is one of the most representative figures of Italian "scientific" psychology. He is considered one of the founders of the discipline as well as one of its main protagonists in the years between the two World Wars. Both with his extensive scientific productions (which include more than three hundred works) and with his uninterrupted institutional activity, he has left his significant mark on the history of Italian psychology. He was the first professor of Experimental Psychology and was internationally known: some of his works have been published in French, Swiss, American, German, Scandinavian, and English journals, and some of his volumes have been translated into English and German. Together with the other psychologists of the second generation (Binet, Külpe, Münsterberg, Stern, Claparède, Ebbinghaus), he was the Italian psychologist who decided to enrich the classical paradigm of Wundt's physiological psychology, by developing during the twentieth century the program of methodological and epistemological enlargement of the discipline. In his fundamental treatise Psicologia Sperimentale, written in 1929-30, a clear modern conception of psychology emerged: it jointly included both the generalist aspect (with some studies on psychophysical proportionality, thought mimicry, dreams, attention, emotions, etc.) and the applicative one, which included psychopathology, labor psychology, educational psychology, and criminal psychology, all seen in a general experimental framework. The present paper aims precisely to highlight the originality of De Sanctis' experimentalism that applied the differential clinical approach to the discipline of psychology, causing it for the first time in Italy to be seen in a unitary way as both general and applied psychology.

This introduction to the Proceedings of the Beijing Symposium poses the problem of the birth of a "new psychology" that endeavors to become a science, considered within the cultural, scientific, social, and institutional context of each country. This problem can be subdivided into a series of other more specific questions, dealt with in part by the volume's contributions: the distinction between a "scientific" psychology and a "pre-scientific" one; the historical reconstruction of psychology as a "science," and of psychology as a "discipline" embedded in some institution; the time span in which the passage from the "old" to the "new" was achieved; the scientific-cultural and political-economic-social factors or conditions that influenced and favoured this birth. After a panoramic and "comparative" glance at the situation in different European countries (Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain, and Russia) and some extra-European ones (United States, Brazil, Japan, and China), as presented in the texts of these Proceedings, there follow some considerations of a general nature that attempt to highlight analogies and differences in the historical development of the origin of "scientific" psychology in the various countries.

The origins of scientific psychology in Japan arrived primarily through six routes. First, psychology was imported through translations by Amane Nishi, which resulted in the coining of words such as "psychology," "subject," and "object." Second, psychology arrived in the form of education that was directed by American Christian missionaries. The third route brought psychology through lectures presented at universities (e.g., Masakazu Toyama began lecturing at the University of Tokyo in 1877). The fourth route relates to teacher education: Shuji Izawa and Hideo Takamine introduced psychology as part of the first curriculum at Tokyo Higher Normal School in 1879. The fifth route was created by Japanese philosophers who studied abroad, such as Tetsujiro Inouye. Finally, the sixth and most important avenue involved the introduction of experimental psychology, as well as a formal educational curriculum for psychologists (e.g., Yujiro Motora was the first Japanese to introduce experimental psychology to Japan, where he trained many students). Consequently, the establishment of scientific psychology in Japan was primarily owed to the Japanese scholars who studied abroad in the U.S. and Germany.

Psychology has become a protean "multi-discipline" that occupies a peculiar place among the sciences, suspended between methodological orientations derived from the physical and biological sciences and a subject matter extending into the social and human sciences. At the same time, modern societies have become permeated--some would say saturated--with psychological thinking and practices, much of which relates tenuously at best to what goes on in the discipline. In these remarks, both of these developments are placed in historical context, focusing particularly on Germany and Austria. Particular emphasis is placed on the roles of politics, society, and culture in the formation and reception of psychological thought and research, as well as in the creation and uses of psychological knowledge in practical contexts.

This paper examines the history of psychology in Germany. It directs attention to the salient role played by examination regulations in the development of psychology. To highlight this, the term "discipline" is employed not as a synonym of "science" but according to its original meaning, as denoting a social entity consisting of teachers, disciples, more or less canonised subject matters, examinations, and resulting changes of the social status of the examinee. In the early nineteenth century a succession of state rescripts and regulations introduced to university curricula an examination subject named psychology, thereby making psychology an obligatory subject of university lectures, and creating a discipline of psychology next to the science of psychology. The two were far from being identical. This situation, thus far neglected in historiography, profoundly influenced the further development of psychology in Germany.

By reviewing especially Lewin's researches from his German period - which are important insofar as they exhibit the epistemological grounds of his whole work, as well as his fundamental insights into the "structure of mind" - the Author points out a series of difficulties inherent in Lewin's original approach. Such difficulties also explain why Lewin's grandiose program to develop a scientific psychology, more mathematico-galilaeiano, was after his time abandoned. Indeed, if on the one hand a rereading of Lewin's epistemology reveals the unexpected debt he pays to the mechanical model of thought, yet, on the other hand, a careful analysis of his notion of "field," otherwise fruitful, shows that he can neither consistently exploit his phenomenological view of the field as a "space of life," nor adequately deal with the human subject by the mere experimental method. As a matter of fact, the brave effort to join the two patterns together - the phenomenological and the experimental-objectivistic-mathematical one - produces a basic ambiguity, owing not so much to Lewin's limitations as to the epochal clash between two patterns that are actual gnoseological and methodological archetypes. Nevertheless, some weakness in Lewin's "dynamic" approach does not seem by itself to prejudge his later social psychology; rather, also in the light of recent historiography, the question of the link between these different moments of his work should be reconsidered.

The focus of this paper is the interplay between evidence and theory, which is at the heart of the methodological question. I address it using as a case study the homeopathic medicine discovered/invented by C.S. Hahnemann in the late eighteenth century. After presenting a quick reconstruction of Hahnemann' s life and work as a medical doctor, I turn to the way in which he came to enunciate the two founding principles of homeopathy: the "law of simile" and the "law of dilution." I compare the way in which homeopathy was received and its therapeutic success evaluated up until the mid-to-late 1800s, to the way in which it is currently regarded. I conclude that the shift from a mixture of appreciation and doubt to the outright denial of all evidence in favour of homeopathy is in line with the most striking (though not necessarily the most productive) trend of twentieth century science: one that is heavily biased in favour of theory and against evidence. In the case of homeopathy such a position led to ignoring evidence gathered in diverse fields, mainly immunology and chemical physics, showing respectively that ultra-diluted solutions have biological effects and that the values of their parameters differ from those of water. The advancement of knowledge is more likely to result from a further investigation of this evidence, with the aim of explaining the law of dilution, than it is from insisting that this law is nonsense because an explanation of it is not, at present, available.

Starting from the reading of a recent biography of the Dutch materialistic physiologist Jacopo Moleschott (1822-1893), this article proposes a brief survey of the impact, especially in Italy, of the materialistic paradigm, not only in the field of medicine and of the natural sciences, but also in that of philosophy and of literature. From the rejection and ferocious criticisms of the Jesuits, such as Padre Previti, to the harsh ironies of Tommaseo--who, in reference to the academic lessons of Moleschott, spoke of "confused Germanic blasphemy"--, the survey proceeds to a recognition of the role and influence of Moleschott's perspective in the field of medicine, in that of science, and especially in the philosophical and epistemological debate on the relation between the experimental sciences and philosophy. The survey then proceeds to touch on the classical controversy over the Chemische Briefe of Liebig (1844), the dispute with Bufalini on the new way of thinking about the relation between physiology and pathology, and the influence exerted by the Dutch physiologist on Salvatore Tommasi. The article in the end broadens to include a rapid analysis of Moleschott's contribution to the field of literature, as well as to the more complicated debate on the natural sciences and materialism, which still today presents, beyond the outdated models of positivistic scientism, well-grounded themes of interest, if not of validity.