I. Kant and C.G. Jung on Impossibility of the Scientific Psychology

Abstract

This study aims to show a similarity of Kant’s and Jung’s approaches to an issue of the possibility of
scientific psychology, hence to explicate what they thought about the future of psychology. Therefore,
the article contains heuristic material, which can contribute in a resolving of such methodological task
as searching of promising directions to improve philosophical and scientific psychology. To achieve the
aim the author attempts to clarify an entity of Kant’s and Jung’s objections against even the possibility
of scientific psychology and to find out ways to overcome those objections in Kant’s and Jung’s works.
The main methods were explication, reconstruction and comparative analysis of Kant’s and Jung’s
views. As a result it was found, that Kant and Jung allocated one and the same obstacles, which, on their
opinion, prevent psychology to become a science in the strict sense. They are: 1) coincidence of subject
and object in psychology; 2) impossibility to apply quantitative mathematic methods in psychology;
3) pendency of the issue of psychophysical parallelism. However, Kant and Jung indicated ways
to resolve formulated by them fundamental difficulties. All those ways lay through the searching a
principle of interaction and connection between the psychic and the physical.