Theodor Waitz's theory of feelings and the rise of affective sciences in the mid-19th century.

The German psychologist Theodor Waitz (1821-1864) was an important theorist of affectivity in the mid-19th century. This article aims to revisit Waitz's contribution to affective psychology at a crucial moment of its history. First, I elaborate the context in which Waitz's ideas were carried out by showing how affective sciences emerged as an autonomous field of investigation between about 1770 and 1910.

Fechner as a pioneering theorist of unconscious cognition.

Fechner remains virtually unknown for his psychological research on the unconscious. However, he was one of the most prominent theorists of unconscious cognition of the 19th century, in the context of the rise of scientific investigations on the unconscious in German psychology. In line with the models previously developed by Leibniz and Herbart, Fechner proposes an explanative system of unconscious phenomena based on a modular conception of the mind and on the idea of a functional dissociation between representational and attentional activity.

["The mind-body problem". The relation of psychical to physical in 19th century German psychology].

During the 19th century, the question of the relation between the soul and the body was deeply renewed by German psychological studies. The new elaborated conception of the relationship between the psychical and the physical coincides with the appearance of a cognitivist paradigm, in which mental phenomena are considered as entities that may be individualised, isolated, and then correlated with the activity of specific neural substrates. German psychologists were confronted with the problem of the correlation between psychical life and the nervous system (localisation of mental phenomena and nature of this correlative relationship), and propose an extensive analysis on the neural conditions and the emergence of psychical processes.