Daniel N Robinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1027393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel N Robinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel N |
| FAMILY NAME | Robinson |
| SIGNATURE | ROBINSON D N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Explanation and the “brain sciences”
The new orthodoxy in much of contemporary psychology would have progress and theoretical development increasingly dependent on technologies designed to reveal aspects of central nervous system function. The goal (by now a rather superannuated one) is to replace an allegedly primitive “folk psychology” with direct assessments of the allegedly causal processes by which the contents of folk psychology are generated. There are, however, cogent argume…
Witherspoon, Scottish Philosophy and the American Founding
Studies of Witherspoon's influence as an educator and as a pivotal figure in the American founding tend to neglect his earlier part in controversies among the Scottish Moderates and Evangelicals. By the time he answered the summons from the College of New Jersey, his position on church-state relations was thoroughly developed as was his understanding of the nature and the sources of rights, both alienable and unalienable. Nor were there ‘two With…
Psychology as its history
Assured by the editor of Theory & Psychology that this will close out the comments and replies on my earlier article (Robinson, 2013a, 2013b), I will consider the constructive and critical points raised by Pettit and Davidson (2014) and by Brock (2014). Brevity is in order here, lest readers be drawn into what finally seems to be a wrangle about nuances
The Scientific Revolution
Romanticism - 1
A word more
Psychology’s place is secure within the history of ideas even if systematically overlooked by those who would professionalize intellectual inquiry. At base the controversy featured here is between a misplaced positivism and the humanistic project of History. Exercises in the sociology of knowledge are not paths to understanding but departures from those paths
Big brains and Boskops
A persistent strategy in contemporary neuroscience would reduce complex social and cognitive phenomena to states and functions of the brain. When extended to reach fundamental issues in philosophy, a new specialty—neurophilosophy—is offered as a means by which to collapse a number of perennial questions into a more tractable set of structure–function relationships. Illustrative are studies of the “locus” of moral decision-making (Greene, Sommervi…
Historiography in psychology
A persistent theme in books and essays concerning the history of psychology suggests something amiss in tracing that history to ancient sources. Authoritative writers on the subject reject any intimation of continuity from classical to modern perspectives. Nonetheless, writers of textbooks identify the ancient world of philosophy and science as wellsprings of issues still alive within the discipline. To some, this tendency is attributed to simple…
A brief note on “moral psychology”
Attempts to establish biological foundations of moral decision-making reflect a general failure to identify just what renders a decision “moral.” Moreover, there is a comparably general confusion as to what is foundational in such inquiries. The foundations are metaphysical and the noninferential data of relevance are provided at the phenomenological level
Consciousness
Reductive strategies are especially ill suited to the nature and study of consciousness. The major result of conventional modes of inquiry is the enlargement of the list of correlates, none of which alone or in combination recovers the phenomenon itself
The Business of Healing, Then and Now
The healer’s professional role and socioeconomic status from ancient to modern times. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association
Consciousness and Mental Life
In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modifi…
Theoretical Psychology
It remains unclear as to just what a `theoretical psychology' might be or might claim as a mission. This is distinct from various and ad hoc psychological theories (e.g. Hullian learning theory, the opponent-process theory of color vision) which admit at least in principle of empirical tests of adequacy. The example of theoretical physics is offered heuristically to test the different senses of `theoretical psychology'
The Reunification of Rational and Emotional Life
It is suggested in this article that the need to ‘reunify’ the rational and the emotional is artificially created by the prior partitioning of the two. It is by way of a version of the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ that the rational and affective dimensions of life have come to be seen as discrete ‘faculties’ or ‘processes’, presumably mediated by or caused by or correlated with still more basic physiological ‘processes’. All this is but another conse…
Jefferson and Adams on the mind-body problem
Amidst the voluminous correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are several letters pertaining to the material basis of mental life. These reveal in a most suggestive way the substantial differences between them. Well informed on prevailing scientific and philosophical perspectives, Jefferson and Adams used the issue to express their positions on the nature and limits of knowledge, the relative authority of scientific methods and spe…
A Student's Guide to Psychology (Isi Guides to the Major Disciplines)
Sigmund Koch--philosophically speaking
Sigmund Koch—philosophically speaking
Sigmund Koch's legacy is not merely a record of robust criticism aimed at (now mostly failed) dominant perspectives in psychology. Rather, his prescient and tutored thought captured particular habits of mind and institutionalized modes of inquiry likely to retard progress in psychology indefinitely. In important respects, it is Koch's critical assessments of his own earlier commitments and enthusiasms that exemplify his project for any "scientifi…
Paradigms and 'the Myth of Framework'
Paradigms and `the Myth of Framework
Very little that passes today for conventional practices in psychology would measure up well against the current and traditional standards that guide thinking in the developed sciences. The best explanation for this is not the alleged complexity of the subject matter, but an utterly tamed and merely habitual mode of explanation tied to profound misunderstandings about the nature and conditions of scientific progress. Culprits are not difficult to…
Philosophy of psychology
Philosophy of psychology
The Marginal and the Central in William James
Therapy as Theory and as Civics
The conventional wisdom is that the therapeutic enterprise is `value-neutral', not impelled by any moral agenda, and intended chiefly to render its beneficiaries more successful in attaining what they desire. I argue in the present article that, were this the case, there could be nothing therapeutic in the undertaking; further, that one should be assisted in attaining what should be desirable, but what may not, in the given case, be desired. The …
Wild Beasts and Idle Humours
Journal Article Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: the Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present Get access Robinson Daniel N., Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: the Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. vi, 299 pp. $29.95. Gerald J. Russello Gerald J. Russello New York City, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, V…
On the Primacy of Duties
The concept of rights is among the more thoroughly examined in political philosophy. Nonetheless, it remains ontologically elusive and morally problematical. In the form of an allegedly natural endowment bequeathed by the Stoic philosophers, it was famously dismissed by Bentham as ‘nonsense on stilts’. Chiefly by way of natural law theory and versions of Kantian moral philosophy rights arise at once from the presupposed autonomy of rational being…
Therapies
What Sort of Persons Are Hemispheres? Another Look at ‘Split-Brain’ Man
Wild Beasts and Idle Humours
Journal Article Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: the Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present Get access Robinson Daniel N., Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: the Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. vi, 299 pp. $29.95. Gerald J. Russello Gerald J. Russello New York City, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, V…
Is there a Jamesian tradition in psychology
Jefferson and Adams on the mind-body problem
Amidst the voluminous correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are several letters pertaining to the material basis of mental life. These reveal in a most suggestive way the substantial differences between them. Well informed on prevailing scientific and philosophical perspectives, Jefferson and Adams used the issue to express their positions on the nature and limits of knowledge, the relative authority of scientific methods and spe…
Sigmund Koch—philosophically speaking
Sigmund Koch's legacy is not merely a record of robust criticism aimed at (now mostly failed) dominant perspectives in psychology. Rather, his prescient and tutored thought captured particular habits of mind and institutionalized modes of inquiry likely to retard progress in psychology indefinitely. In important respects, it is Koch's critical assessments of his own earlier commitments and enthusiasms that exemplify his project for any "scientifi…
Statistical Features of Brain Responses under Conditions of Attention and Habituation
This research is concerned with the variance of average evoked responses (AER) under conditions of habituation and that of attentive viewing. The major findings suggest that habituation is the result of increased activity in central sensory systems but an activity that is less organized than that resulting from attentive-state stimulation. Data are also presented which assess certain broad assumptions common to AER research
Therapies
The authority of reason will suffice
Harm, offense, and nuisance
What Sort of Persons Are Hemispheres? Another Look at ‘Split-Brain’ Man
Impact on science
Impact on science
Cerebral plurality and the unity of self
Cerebral plurality and the unity of self
IQ and Mental Testing
Ethics and advocacy
Ethics and advocacy
The new philosophy of science
The new philosophy of science
A reply to two critics
A reply to two critics
The Scottish Enlightenment and its mixed bequest
The Scottish Enlightenment spawned a uniquely psychological philosophy grounded in pre-Darwinian conceptions of natural fitness and post-Newtonian natural laws. Richly anticipating the developments of the nineteenth century, major Scottish philosophical psychologists pressed for an experimental science of the mind stripped of traditional metaphysical suppositions. But in imparting to a new “scientific” psychology just these attributes, the same i…
Aristotle’S Psychology
Thomas Reid and the aberdeen years
The school of Common Sense Psychology generally associated with Thomas Reid can actually claim a number of Aberdeen parents and must be understood within the larger context of mid-eighteenth century Scottish intellectual developments. Concurrent with the rise of the school of Common Sense Psychology was the reform of the Aberdeen curriculum and a rededication to Baconian-Newtonian natural science. A number of leading Aberdeen academics took the i…
Wisdom through the ages
In this brief historical review of the topic of wisdom, selectivity is not only unavoidable but also unavoidably arbitrary. The subject forms perhaps the major chapter in the history of philosophy where it is often inextricably joined to political, moral, and jural matters. It is also both the aim and the target of various literary genres, of scripture, meditation, and the saintly ways of life. Most of this falls beyond the editor's expectations,…
Might the Self be a Substance after all
Substance theories of the Self have enjoyed little attention or support since the seventeenth century. Locke and Hume established the empiricistic standards for understanding the concept and Kant, within a very different tradition, seemed to render it jejune. Ryle famously and relentlessy subjected substance theories to a criticism bordering on ridicule. At present, such theories and the Self they would sustain have received yet another and diffe…
The Philosopher in the Clinic
Is there a Jamesian tradition in psychology
The Demography of the Kingdom of Ends
In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals' Kant is explicit, sometimes to the point of peevishness, in denying anthropology and psychology any part or place in his moral science. Recognizing that this will strike many as counterintuitive he is unrepentant: ‘We require no skill to make ourselves intelligible to the multitude once we renounce all profundity of thought’. That the doctrine to be defended is not exemplified in daily experience or …
How the American Psychologist Saw B.F. Skinner
Psychology (39 works) · Epistemology (31 works) · Philosophy (31 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Psychoanalysis (15 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (13 works) · Cognitive science (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works)