Contexts and experimentalism in the psychology of Gabriele Buccola (1875-1885)

Gabriele Buccola, since his untimely death, often has been mentioned as the first Italian psychologist who developed a strict program of laboratory research. Buccola, a Sicilian of Albanian ancestry, is a "case" in the history of Italian psychology. A self-taught positivist, he established a relation with the major representatives of the European positivism. Kraepelin mentions him as one of the precursors of his project of applying experimental psychology to psychopathology. Buccola actually carried out research on the psychological, chemical-biological, and psychopathological "modifiers" of reaction times, following an experimental program dealing mainly with the differential study both of basic and superior psychological processes, with mental hygiene ends. Historians of psychology agree in considering Buccola the first Italian laboratory psychologist to plan a program of research that was close to European psychological experimentalism. The present article, starting from an outline of Buccola's role in the rising Italian scientific psychology, recontextualizes his experimentalism in an international sphere. This operation, which is carried out through a careful survey of Buccola's entire production-both theoretical and more properly scientific-is based on the search of the Darwinian, Spencerian, and Haeckelian evolutionist themes emerging from Buccola's program of research-a program that was influenced by the variegated European experimental panorama and characterized by the vision of science as a knowledge capable of transforming the nature of man and of society.