Describing the shift in mainstream American psychology since William James, Joseph Gilbert writes,
Philosophical spectulation was, with considerable clatter, abandoned as the ultimate in unscientificism…. By the majestically immaterial phenomena of consciousness the Behaviorists were as embarrassed as a group of slightly inebriated men carrying the insensible form of one of their companions across a fashionable hotel lobby.
Academic criticism is usually more genteel, so I found that amusing. Especially since one of my professors was a colleague of B.F. Skinner.
This is from an article in the journal I’m studying, which tries to enlist the ghost of James for the fight between humanistic and behavioristic psychology — since, while the latter was empirical and anti-phenomenological, both James and the humanists embraced idiography and philosophical speculation.
(from “William James in retrospect: 1962″, J. of Humanistic Psych. II:1, Spring 1962, p. 93.)
