James Mark Baldwin

James Mark Baldwin (1917)

James Mark Baldwin (born January 12, 1861 in Columbia , South Carolina , † November 8, 1934 in Paris ) was an American philosopher and psychologist . He studied at Princeton University a . a. with the Scottish philosopher James McCosh and in Oxford, Leipzig, Berlin and Tübingen. He made important contributions to the beginnings of psychology , psychiatry and evolutionary theory, and in 1898 he set up the first psychological laboratory in the English-speaking world.

biography

Beginnings

Baldwin received a research grant from the "Green Fellowship" which he used for a study visit to Germany (1884–85). He studied with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and with Friedrich Paulsen in Berlin.

In 1885 he became a teacher of French and German at the Princeton seminary. During this time Baldwin translated “La psychologie allemande contemporaine” by Théodule Ribot into English and wrote his first publication: “The Postulates of a Physiological Psychology” . The work led from the origins of psychology with Immanuel Kant via Johann Friedrich Herbart , Gustav Theodor Fechner , Rudolf Hermann Lotze to Wilhelm Wundt .

While serving as a professor of philosophy at Lake Forest College (1887), he married the seminary president's daughter, Helen Hayes Green. Here he published the first part of his "Handbook of Psychology (Senses and Intellect)" , thus disseminating the results of the emerging experimental psychology of Weber, Fechner and Wundt.

In 1889 Baldwin received the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Toronto . There he founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Canada, which his successor later expanded to 16 rooms. During this time his daughters Helen (1889) and Elizabeth (1891) were born. His observations on infants inspired him to conduct quantitative and experimental research on child development, which he conducted in 1894 under the title “Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Methods and Processes ” published. Baldwin coined the term non-dualism ( adualism ) for the lack of a boundary or the non-distinction between the inner world of the toddler and the totality of the external realities that affect it. The results of this research had lasting influences on Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg .

The second part of the "Handbook of Psychology (Feeling and Will)" appeared in 1891. Its two handbook volumes competed with William James "Principles of Psychology" in 1890.

During these creative years, Baldwin traveled to France in 1892 to meet the great psychiatrists Jean-Martin Charcot from the Hôpital Salpêtrière , Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy and Pierre Janet .

Princeton

In 1893 Baldwin was appointed to the Chair of Psychology at Princeton University . At the same time he was given the opportunity to set up a new psychological laboratory. Baldwin reached here in 1903 with the publication of his work “Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development. A Study in Social Psychology “ the high point of his career. With this work he presented a critical revision of his early publication "Mental Development" , which strongly influenced the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and, through his work, Alexander Romanowitsch Lurija . A synthesis of this chain of effects can finally be found in Alexej Leontjew .

Baldwin completed his psychological work with philosophy, especially with epistemology as he presented it to the American Psychological Association in 1897. At this event, he also announced the work on his Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology . In the following period he had intensive philosophical correspondence with the 60 participants in this project, which was completed in 1902. A particularly important participant in the project was Conway Lloyd Morgan . He was perhaps the only one who understood the so-called " Baldwin Effect ". A large number of the articles are from Charles S. Peirce , for whom this work made a significant contribution to his livelihood.

In 1899 Baldwin accompanied and supervised the publication of the "Dictionary" in Oxford . In this context, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University .

While at Princeton, Baldwin founded the journals Psychological Review , Psychological Bulletin, and Psychological Index with James McKeen Cattell and others .

Johns Hopkins

Due to a dispute with the President of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson and because of a cheap offer from Johns Hopkins University , which promised better pay and less teaching, Baldwin moved there in 1903 as a professor of philosophy and psychology. The experimental laboratory founded here by Stanley Hall in 1884 was reopened by him.

In Baltimore , Baldwin began work on “Thoughts and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought. Or Genetic Logic ” (1906), a brief account of his ideas contained in “ Genetic Theory of Reality. Being the Outcome of Genetic Logic as Issuing in the Aesthetic Theory of Reality called Pancalism ” (1915) came to maturity.

His career in America ended in 1908 when he was involved in a sex scandal that was brought about by the raid on a brothel . Baldwin was forced to leave Johns Hopkins University. He lived in Paris from that year until his death.

Mexico

Baldwin's stay in France was interrupted by his work at the Facultad de Estudios Superiores of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City (1908-12). During this time he wrote "Darwin and the Humanities" (1909) and "Individual and Society" (1911). From 1912 he had his permanent residence in Paris.

Paris

Because of his ties to France, Baldwin became convinced that America should give up its neutral stance in World War I. Therefore, in 1916 he published the text "American Neutrality, Its Cause and Cure" . That year he survived a German torpedo attack on the Sussex in the English Channel while on a ship voyage to William Osler, and he then sent an open telegram to the US President, which was published in the New York Times . After America entered the war in 1917, Baldwin became chairman of the US Navy League, and he held this office until 1922. In 1926 his memoirs appeared under the title "Between Two Wars (1861-1921)" .

Baldwin and Maine de Biran

In 1924, the 100th anniversary of Maine de Birans (French philosopher, 1776-1824) death was commemorated in France . In his honor, Henri Delacroix (1873–1937) gave a lecture at the French Philosophical Society with the title: "Maine de Biran et l'ecole Medico-psychologique". In this lecture, the importance of Main de Biran for the psychology developed by Antoine Royer-Collard was emphasized, which he represented as head of the asylum in Charenton . Royer-Collard had asked de Biran to review the curriculum for teaching mental illnesses at the medical school.

In "History of psychology: A sketch and an interpretation" (1913) Baldwin analyzed the meaning of Maine de Biran.

The Biran theme is topical due to recent studies on awareness-raising. In these works, Antonio Damasio deal critically with René Descartes and Merlin Donald in a reassessment with Étienne Bonnot de Condillac without appreciating the contributions of Maine de Biran on the topic of consciousness development.

Organic selection

The idea of ​​organic selection came to Baldwin on the basis of measurable data from his experimental studies of the grasping behavior of infants and its role in mental development. Each actively performed movement of the child strived to find out and integrate the most favorable behavior for development within the options of the experiment by increasing the movements.

In the more advanced stages of development - those particularly important to understanding evolution - evidence was provided through children's efforts to learn to draw and write.

Inspired by the model of divine predestination as seen by Spinoza , Baldwin linked his idea with the philosophy of mind from the start.

His profound knowledge of the practical nature of dynamogenic development, especially his integrative view of science, helped his students understand where it differed from Lamarck . This was uniquely illustrated by Gregory Bateson (1979 in Mind and Nature ) and brilliantly combined with more recent studies by Terence Deacon (1997 in The Symbolic Species: The co-evolution of language and the human brain ).

Effects

Baldwin's most significant theoretical legacy is his concept of evolution - the Baldwin Effect . Baldwin postulated against Lamarck that there is a mechanism that shapes the genome through epigenetic factors to the same extent - or even more - than natural selection can. In particular, sustainable human behavior patterns that have emerged over generations as a set of cultural practices should be possible factors that shape the human genome.

This should be illustrated using the example of the incest taboo : If the taboo of incestion is strictly observed in a culture, the natural selection pressure against genes that promote incest is weakened. After a few generations without this selection pressure - unless genetic material was deeply anchored in the genome - it would tend to vary and eventually lose its function. People would not have an innate aversion to incest, but they could fall back on the standards applicable in their culture and internalize them.

The opposite case could also occur: cultural practice could selectively breed people in order to adapt them culturally and physically to new environmental conditions. In Baldwin's understanding, evolution can both weaken and strengthen a genetic trait.

influence

Baldwin's work is in the midst of the current debates in developmental psychology and, in a broader sense, sociobiology . It is largely thanks to Robert Wozniak , professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College that Baldwin was rediscovered for the history of ideas. 2000 Ken Wilber named Baldwin as a pioneer of his theory of an integral psychology.

See also

• Mirror stage

items

• Feeling, Belief, and Judgment . Mind (NS) 1 (1892) 3, 403 - 408

Web links

• Literature by and about James Mark Baldwin in the catalog of the German National Library
• Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901) - includes the letters A - O as html
• Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1905) - includes the letters A - Z as a facsimile