The Philosopher
James Mark Baldwin
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- American
- Schools:
- Organic selection, Baldwin effect
- Branchs:
- Philosophy, Psychology, Psychiatry, Theory of Evolution, Developmental psychology, Epistemology, Evolutionary psychology, Sociobiology
- Period:
- 19th-century
The synopsis
James Mark Baldwin (January 12, 1861 – November 8, 1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist. Educated at Princeton under James McCosh, Baldwin was instrumental in founding the psychology departments at both Princeton University and the University of Toronto. His influential work spanned early psychology, psychiatry, and the theory of evolution, with the "Baldwin effect" in evolutionary biology being named after him. He is recognized for his significant contributions to developmental psychology, particularly his stepwise theory of cognitive development, which significantly influenced Jean Piaget's later work. Baldwin's ideas on the relationship between the ego and the alter, emphasizing imitation and self-development, also found resonance with thinkers like Pierre Janet and Jacques Lacan. He was a co-founder of prominent psychology journals, including "Psychological Review," "Psychological Monographs," and "Psychological Index," and served as the founding editor of "Psychological Bulletin." Baldwin held positions at Lake Forest College, the University of Toronto, Princeton University, and Johns Hopkins University. His career in the United States was cut short by a scandal in 1908, after which he moved to France, where he continued to write and engage in intellectual life until his death.
The works
German Psychology of To-day
Handbook of Psychology
Handbook of Psychology (Feeling and Will)
Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes
Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development: A Study in Social Psychology
Story of the Mind
Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology
Thoughts and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought, Or Genetic Logic
Darwin and the Humanities
Individual and Society
Genetic Theory of Reality: Being the Outcome of Genetic Logic as Issuing in the Aesthetic Theory of Reality called Pancalism
American Neutrality, Its Cause and Cure
Between Two Wars (1861-1921)
The quotes
Psychology more than any other science has had its pseudo-scientific no less than its scientific period.
Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind.
Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.
The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; its terms condition the further problem.
Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.
The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.
In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time.
The reason of the close concurrence between the individual's progress and that of the race appears, therefore, when we remember the dependence of each upon the other.
Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.
In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.
The fact that tradition hinders the individual savage from thinking logically by no means proves that he cannot think logically.
All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.