Psychology and Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract This chapter compares visions for a scientific philosophy developed by three stalwarts of the nascent Mind: Alexander Bain, George Croom Robertson, and William James. The early journal often featured work whose methodology was broadly inspired by Herbert Spencer’s ‘synthetic philosophy’. (Russell later presented his ‘analytic philosophy’ in explicit opposition to Spencer.) Under Bain and Robertson, Mind published key works in this Spencerian vein. Bain and Robertson themselves developed Spencer style, inductivist visions of philosophy and of the associationist psychological science that philosophy was to sit atop. James was a transitional figure. He rejected the view that mental science could straightforwardly yield canons of good reasoning, arguing that psychology uncovers a plurality of cognitive virtues that psychology alone is incapable of ordering. Like Bain and Robertson, James saw psychology as central to philosophy. But like later figures he influenced, James saw analysis as central to epistemology, and epistemology as explanatorily autonomous from psychology.

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