Faculty psychology views the mind as a collection of separate modules or faculties assigned to various mental tasks. The view is explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic Theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas.

It is also present, though more implicitly, in Franz Joseph Gall's formulation of phrenology, the now-disreputable practice of measuring personality traits by measuring bumps on one's head. However, faculty psychology has been revived in Jerry Fodor's concept of modularity of mind, the supposition that different modules autonomously manage sensory input and other mental functions.

However, it is debatable to what extent the continuous mention of faculties throughout the history of psychology should be taken to indicate a continuity of the term's meaning. In medieval writings, psychological faculties were often intimately related to metaphysically-loaded conceptions of forces, particularly to Aristotle's notion of an efficient cause. This is the view of faculties which is explicit in the works of Thomas Aquinas: