Robert M. Young's Mind, Brain and Adaptation revisited

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Christopher Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Philosophy Department ◽  
History Of ◽  
Science Community ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Abstract Robert Maxwell Young's first book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970), written from 1960 to 1965, still merits reading as a study of the naturalization of mind and its relation to social thought in Victorian Britain. I examine the book from two perspectives that give the volume its unique character: first, Young's interest in psychology, which he considered should be used to inform humane professional practices and be the basis of social reform; second, new approaches to the history of scientific ideas. I trace Young's intellectual interests to the Yale Philosophy Department, the Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology and a new history and philosophy of science community. Although Young changed his political outlook and historiography radically after 1965, he always remained faithful to ideas about thought and practice described in Mind, Brain.

The Unknowable

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Mander
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Philosophy

This book presents a history of nineteenth century metaphysics in Britain, providing close textual readings of the key contributions to First Philosophy made by the key philosophers of the period (such as Hamilton, Mansel, Spencer, Mill, and Bradley) as well as some lesser known figures (such as Bain, Clifford, Shadworth Hodgson, Ferrier, and John Grote). The story focuses on the elaboration of, and differing reactions to, the concept of the unknowable or unconditioned, first developed by Sir William Hamilton in the 1829. The idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves may be seen as supplying a narrative arc that runs right through the metaphysical systems of the period in question as, relative to this concept, these thought schemes may be divided into three broad groups which were roughly consecutive in their emergence but also overlapping as they continued to develop. In the first instance there were the doctrines of the agnostics who further progressed Hamilton’s basic idea that fundamental reality lies for the great part beyond our cognitive reach, but these philosophies were followed, immediately by those of the empiricists and, in the last third of the century by those of the idealists, both of whom—albeit in profoundly different ways—reacted against the epistemic pessimism of the agnostics. By presenting, interpreting, criticizing and connecting together their various contrasting ideas this book explains how these three traditions developed and interacted with one another to comprise the history of metaphysics in Victorian Britain.

History of Research in Developmental Psychology

2013 ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
W. Andrew Collins ◽  
Willard W. Hartup
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Psychological Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
History Of

This chapter summarizes the emergence and prominent features of a science of psychological development. Pioneering researchers established laboratories in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to examine the significance of successive changes in the organism with the passage of time. American psychologists, many of whom had studied in the European laboratories, subsequently inaugurated similar efforts in the United States. Scientific theories and methods in the fledgling field were fostered by developments in experimental psychology, but also in physiology, embryology, ethology, and sociology. Moreover, organized efforts to provide information about development to parents, educators, and public policy specialists further propagated support for developmental science. The evolution of the field in its first century has provided a substantial platform for future developmental research.

scholarly journals Exit the frog, enter the human: physiology and experimental psychology in nineteenth-century astronomy

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIMENA CANALES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Physiology ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Sensory Transmission ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intense Debate

This paper deals with one of the first attempts to measure simple reactions in humans. The Swiss astronomer Adolph Hirsch investigated personal differences in the speed of sensory transmission in order to achieve accuracy in astronomy. His controversial results, however, started an intense debate among both physiologists and astronomers who disagreed on the nature of these differences. Were they due to different eyes or brains, or to differences in skill and education? Furthermore, they debated how to eliminate them. Some, for example, wanted to eliminate the observer, and prescribed the use of new technologies like the electro-chronograph or photography, while others believed in discipline and education. By debating the nature of these differences, astronomers and physiologists sketched both different conceptions of ‘man’ and different paths to objectivity. These diverse conceptions, moreover, were tied to current nineteenth-century debates, such as the benefits or disadvantages of railroads, telegraphy and the standardization of time and longitudes. By focusing on the debates surrounding the speed of sensory transmission, this paper reevaluates the history of astronomy, physiology and experimental psychology. Furthermore, in investigating astronomy's relation to the human sciences, it uncovers profound connections in the traditionally separate histories of objectivity and the body.L'heure sera distribuée dans les maisons,comme l'eau ou le gaz.Adolph Hirsch

scholarly journals Inside and Outside the London Stock Exchange: Stockbrokers and Speculation in Late Victorian Britain

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
JAMES TAYLOR
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
London Stock Exchange ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Financial Products ◽  
Innovative Methods ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
History Of

The nineteenth-century growth of the London Stock Exchange and the development of the market for stocks and shares are familiar topics of study. This article provides an alternative perspective on them by decentering the London Stock Exchange and focusing instead on the activities of “outside stockbrokers”—those who operated outside the Stock Exchange and its rules. Often regarded as peripheral, these brokers were in fact instrumental in promoting investment and speculation to a mass market. The article examines their innovative methods, and seeks to explain why they were so successful, despite persistent—and sometimes justifiable—accusations of fraud. It suggests how perspectives from the history of consumer society provide fresh insights into the market for financial products. And it underlines the importance of looking outside formal markets by arguing that focusing on “fringe” markets can help scholars to rethink boundaries, relations, and practices in the history of capitalism.

A HISTORY OF “RATIONALISM” IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Specific Term ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Intense Debate

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

The Temperance Movement in India: Politics and Social Reform

1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Carroll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The temperance/prohibition agitation represents a fascinating chapter in the social and political history of India which has been largely ignored. If any notice is taken of this movement, it is generally dismissed (or elevated) as an example of the uniquely Indian process of ‘sanskritization’ or as an equally unique component of ‘Gandhianism’—in spite of the fact that the liquor question has not been without political importance in the history either of England or of the United States. And in spite of the fact that the temperance agitation in India in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century was intimately connected with temperance agitation in England. Indeed the temperance movement in India was organized, patronized, and instructed by English temperance agitators.

Beyond the Panopticon: Victorian Britain and the Critical Imagination

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Neoliberal Governmentality ◽  
Self Help ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Imagination ◽  
State Interference

Critics' imagining of Victorian history has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogies. Yet Foucault's famous account of modern discipline is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its “liberal” disdain for state interference. Discipline and Punish offered a mid-1970s response to Marxist dilemmas and to the problems of twentieth-century welfare states. In the early 1980s, Foucault discerned the resurgence of liberal economic ideologies, including neo-Victorian beliefs in free trade, self-help, and laissez-faire. Foucault's later essays on today's neoliberal “governmentality” therefore provide better critical tools for the study of nineteenth-century Britain than does Discipline and Punish. Literature offers a key context for this reimagined history. Works by self-consciously progressive writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill elucidate a distinctive liberal quandary: the quest for a modern governing or “pastoral” agency that would be rational, all-embracing, and effective but also antibureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory.

Whewell, William (1794–1886)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menachem Fisch
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Mathematical Truth ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
New Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Ideas

William Whewell’s two seminal works, History of the Inductive Science, from the Earliest to the Present Time (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History (1840), began a new era in the philosophy of science. Equally critical of the British ‘sensationalist’ school, which founded all knowledge on experience, and the German Idealists, who based science on a priori ideas, Whewell undertook to survey the history of all known sciences in search of a better explanation of scientific discovery. His conclusions were as bold as his undertaking. All real knowledge, he argued, is ‘antithetical’, requiring mutually irreducible, ever-present, and yet inseparable empirical and conceptual components. Scientific progress is achieved not by induction, or reading-out theories from previously collected data, but by the imaginative ‘superinduction’ of novel hypotheses upon known but seemingly unrelated facts. He thus broke radically with traditional inductivism – and for nearly a century was all but ignored. In the Philosophy the antithetical structure of scientific theories and the hypothetico-deductive account of scientific discovery form the basis for novel analyses of scientific and mathematical truth and scientific methodology, critiques of rival philosophies of science, and an account of the emergence and refinement of scientific ideas.

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