Chris:
Wow, I didn't know this info about Peirce. Would you recommend a
biography of Peirce?
Ken
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected]
Professor
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
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On 10/22/2010 1:05 AM, Christopher D. Green wrote:
Marc Carter wrote:
Too true. His paper was "The Fixation of Belief," not
knowledge. I teach that paper as "ways of coming to believe,"
but many texts use "ways of coming to know."
That's such a great paper. Those guys were *smart*.
Indeed, Charles Sanders Peirce (note the spelling) may have been
the smartest man in America in the second half of the 19th
century. One article (Cadwallader, /JHBS/, 1974) claims he was
the first experimental psychologist in the US (for his color
vision research in 1877), among his many other professions:
astronomer, gravitational researcher, mathematician, logician,
pragmatic philosopher). But he was also a bit of a whack-job, and
was so successful in pissing off so many powerful people that,
after his father died, his career rapidly whithered to nearly
nothing. Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard, wouldn't
allow Peirce on campus (even though he had graduated from there,
and both his father and brother were professors there). Simon
Newcomb regularly went out of his way to undermine Peirce's job
prospects. Daniel C. Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins, fired
him (to a first approximation) because he moved in with his
(future) second wife before finalizing the divorce from his first
wife (the first of the big three psych-related sex-scandal
firings from Hopkins -- Baldwin, Watson). It was the last
academic position he ever held. G. Stanley Hall got the Hopkins
professorship instead. When William R. Harper, the president of
U. Chicago, considered hiring Peirce (with Wm. James'
recommendation), Harvard philosopher George H. Palmer warned
Harper off him. John Dewey got that job instead. By the 1900s,
the only friends Peirce seemed to have left were his former
student, Christine Ladd Franklin (who thought he had begun to
lose his mind in the 1890s) and William James (who would
periodically solicit donations on Peirce's behalf to enable him
to keep body and soul together at the increasingly decrepit rural
Pennsylvania farm to which he had retreated).
A very sad story.
=================
Michael Sylvester wrote:
Thought I read about this or something similar from Christopher
Green.Didn't the German philosophers like Nietsche (sp) and
others had this idea of a master race.
Btw,Leipzig was a hot bed of anti-semitism long before the rise
of the Nazism.The German intellectual circles excluded many jews
from participation.
Nope. Not from me. Anti-semitism was fairly widespread in
Germany, and indeed the rest of Europe (I give you the Dreyfus
Affair in France). I don't know that Leipzig was a particular
hotbed (and Wundt wasn't from Leipzig anyway, he just ended up
there. He was raised in Baden and educated mostly in Heidelberg).
It is true that Jews were barred from various professions in
Germany (which is why, for instance, Freud moved from neurology
to medicine). Solomon Diamond says that, as a child, Wundt
regularly visited a Jewish family and sometimes even went to
Temple with them (in Rieber & Robinson, _Wilhelm Wundt in
history_). Hugo Muensterberg was a student of Wundt. He had been
born Jewish, but converted to Lutheranism before going to
university (I think). I'm not sure if there were other Jewish
students in Wundt's lab. George Mandler's _History of Modern
Experimental Psychology_ says that Wundt was quite liberal, even
radical, in his early days. He served in a local parliament for a
term under the banner of the Progress Party. But he grew
increasingly conservative and nationalistic as he aged. In 1914
he signed the "Manifesto of the 93," denying German culpability
in the starting of the war. After the war, in late 1918, just a
little more than a year before his death, Wundt adopted the
/Dolchstoss/ view of Germany's defeat -- that Germany had been
"stabbed in the back" by its own Social Democrats, Bolsheviks,
and Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_legend).
This was an explicitly anti-semitic position, and it was later
used to great effect by the Nazi party to rouse public anger at
Jews, but that ultimate outcome was not at all visible back in 1919.
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-2100 ex. 66164
[email protected]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
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