| Behaviorism
Ivan Pavlov was not doing psychology research when he discovered what later resulted in his receipt of the Nobel Prize. The Russian physiologist was studying the digestive processes in dogs. This is how he discovered classical conditioning. His research findings were the impetus for the behaviorist perspective. Curiously similar was Ensor’s entry in the field of behavioral psychology when his objective was also to study physiology – while doing cardiovascular research for his Ph.D. dissertation in the old Pavlovian Laboratory at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The laboratory was established by W. Horsley Gantt, M.D. Gantt was the first and probably the only American to work extensively with Pavlov in his Petrograd laboratory.
W. Horsley Gantt received his B.S. in 1917 from the University of North Carolina and his M.D. in 1920 from the University of Virginia. Gantt went to Russia in the 1920s with the American Relief Administration, and while there became a student of Pavlov. He came to Johns Hopkins in 1929 and founded the Pavlovian Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Gantt devoted his scientific career to furthering an understanding of the connections between physiological functions and behavior. He wrote over 400 scientific articles and several books, and he translated many of Pavlov's works into English.
Existentialism, on the other hand, is about the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point for philosophical thought.
A leap of faith according to Kierkegaard involves circularity insofar as a leap is made by faith. In his book The Concept of Anxiety, he describes the core part of the leap of faith, the leap. Kierkegaard maintains that the transition from one quality to another cannot take place gradually, but only by a "leap". When the transition happens, one moves directly from one state to the other, never possessing both qualities.
The leap of faith is his conception of how one would believe in God, or how a person would "fall in love". Faith is not a decision based on evidence that, say, certain beliefs about God are true or a certain person is worthy of love. No such evidence could ever be enough to pragmatically justify the kind of total commitment involved in true religious faith or romantic love. Faith involves making that commitment anyway. Kierkegaard thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt one's beliefs about God; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought involved in weighing evidence, without which the faith would have no real substance. Someone who does not realize that Christian doctrine is inherently doubtful and that there can be no objective certainty about its truth does not have faith but is merely credulous. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God. As Kierkegaard writes, "doubt is conquered by faith".
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