Alcmaeon of Croton
U.P.V. Alcmaeon is named after natural philosopher and medical theorist Alcmaeon of Croton. He was born around 535 B.C. and was a follower of dualism. He came forth from the school of natural philosophers where Pythagoras taught.
 
The written work of Alcmaeon was only kept in the form of quotes in works of later writers like Plato and Hippocrates. For example: “Is it our blood, with which we think, or the air, or the fire? Or is it none of these things, but mainly the brains, which allow for hearing, sight and smell? And from there emerge the thinking and the opinion, and from thinking and opinion.. The knowledge.. As long as the brains have not been damaged, so long does man have his conscience. With that I confirm that our brains are that which allow conscience to speak.” This shows that he paid a lot of attention to the senses in his work. Alcmaeon presented an explanation for sleep and sense-based perception and why that perception does not always correlate with reality. He was the first to actively think about what we in the current day call psychology. For him, health meant a balance of different forces. An illness, according to him, meant a dominance of one of the forces following a disturbed climate, nourishment or physical way of living.
 
Alcmaeon was the first to see the brains as the centre of intellectual activity. He viewed them as an essential part of thinking, with which we could tell ourselves apart from animals. In his time however, he was not understood. Alcmaeon of Croton was an independent, enterprising, stubborn and recalcitrant figure who was way ahead of his time. U.P.V. Alcmaeon is happy to have him as figurehead.
 
Founding
Alcmaeon was founded on the 6th of June 1990 as Utrecht-based association for psychology. Three years later, in 1993, Alcmaeon became a faculty association after the faculty’s insistence. Because no association specifically catered to students of psychology, the Psychology-sub was launched in 2007, specifically for psychology members of Alcmaeon. However, the Psychology-sub changed into the psychology branch in 2013, which organises activities with a psychological edge. In this way, Alcmaeon aimed to reach more students attending the entire faculty. In 2016, there was a plan to restore Alcmaeon to being an association for psychology. This plan was hatched because a large portion of our members were psychology students anyway, and Alcmaeon would be better off focusing on the needs of psychology students. On the 6th of June 2017 the statutory amendments were made and from this date onwards Alcmaeon returned to being a Utrecht-based association for psychology. This makes us the largest association at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and one of the largest study associations of Utrecht.