Daniel Robinson

Scientism: The New Orthodoxy is a comprehensive philosophical overview of the question of scientism, discussing the place of science in the humanities and religion. Clarifying and defining the key terms in play in discussions of scientism, this collection identifies the dimensions that differentiate science from scientism. Leading scholars appraise the means available to science, covering the impact of the neurosciences and the new challenges it presents for the law and the self. Illustrating the effect of scientism on the humanities, Scientism: The New Orthodoxy addresses what science is. This provocative collection is an important contribution to the humanities in the 21st century. Contributors include: Peter Hacker, Bastian van Fraassen, Kenneth Schaffner, Roger Scruton, James K.A. Smith, Richard Swinburne, Lawrence Principe and Richard Williams.

From the Upanishads to Homer -- Philosophy, did the Greeks invent it -- Pythagoras and the divinity of number -- What is there? -- The Greek tragedians on man's fate -- Herodotus and the lamp of history -- Socrates on the examined life -- Plato's search for truth -- Can virtue be taught? -- Plato's Republic, man writ large -- Hippocrates and the science of life -- Aristotle on the knowable -- Aristotle on friendship -- Aristotle on the perfect life -- Rome, the Stoics, and the rule of law -- The Stoic bridge to Christianity -- Roman law, making a city of the once-wide world -- The light within, Augustine on human nature -- Islam -- Secular knowledge, the idea of university -- The reappearance of experimental science -- Scholasticism and the theory of natural law -- The Renaissance, was there one? -- Let us burn the witches to save them -- Francis Bacon and the authority of experience -- Descartes and the authority of reason -- Newton, the saint of science -- Hobbes and the social machine -- Locke's Newtonian science of the mind -- No matter? The challenge of materialism -- Hume and the pursuit of happiness -- Thomas Reid and the Scottish school -- France and the philosophes -- The federalist papers and the great experiment -- What is enlightenment? Kant on freedom -- Moral science and the natural world -- Phrenology, a science of the mind -- The idea of freedom -- The Hegelians and history -- The aesthetic movement, genius -- Nietzsche at the twilight -- The liberal tradition, J.S. Mill -- Darwin and nature's "purposes" -- Marxism, dead but not forgotten -- The Freudian world -- The radical William James -- William James' pragmatism -- Wittgenstein and the discursive turn -- Alan Turing in the forest of wisdom -- Four theories of the good life -- Ontology, what there "really" is -- Philosophy of science, the last word? -- Philosophy of psychology and related confusions -- Philosophy of mind, if there is one -- What makes a problem "moral" -- Medicine and the value of life -- On the nature of law -- Justice and just wars -- Aesthetics, beauty without observers -- God, really?

With this volume, the third in what will be a total of ten, the scholarly debt to Knud Haakonssen and Penn State University Press continues, as they provide authoritative editions of the works of Thomas Reid. The current volume is based on the one edition of this work that appeared in Reid’s lifetime, and it differs from that edition solely in the correction of typographical errors in the original. Appended to the Essays is Reid’s “Three Lectures on the Nature and Duration of the Soul,” in which the indestructibility of matter grounds Reid’s naturalistic argument for the immortality of the soul.

"An American psychologist, Daniel N. Robinson, traces the development of the insanity plea...[He offers] an assured historical survey." Roy Porter, The Times [UK] "Wild Beasts and Idle Humours is truly unique. It synthesizes material that I do not believe has ever been considered in this context, and links up the historical past with contemporaneous values and politics. Robinson effortlessly weaves religious history, literary history, medical history, and political history, and demonstrates how the insanity defense cannot be fully understood without consideration of all these sources." Michael L. Perlin, New York Law School "Daniel N. Robinson has written a graceful history of insanity and the law stretching from Homer to Hinckley. He attempts no final theory as to how the law should cope with the insane; he seeks, rather, to use the shifting notions of when madness exculpates criminal activity to illuminate the core self-perceptions of the cultures developing ever-evolving resolutions of the problem...[T]he grandeur of the theme...commands attention and respect." --Neal Johnston, The Nation

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it might seem that questions about the nature of the mind are best left to scientists rather than philosophers. How could the views of Aristotle or Descartes or Kant possibly contribute anything to debates about these issues, when the relevant neurophysiological facts and principles were completely unknown to them? This Oxford Reader shows that the arguments of philosophers throughout history still provide essential insights into contemporary questions about the mind and help to clarify the underlying scientific assumptions. Contributions from thinkers ranging from Plato and Locke to Roger Penrose and Oliver Sacks show that appreciating the full complexity of debates about consciousness, intelligence, and perception demands attention to fundamental questions that have occupied philosophers for over two thousand years.

In his preface to Mental Reality the author cautions that much of what appears in the book has surely been said before, noting that he has probably forgotten some of his own debts. However, the pages that follow turn out to be paradoxically original and unsurprising; original, against the contemporary background of all too many thick-but-thin disquisitions on the same subject, and unsurprising owing to the author's respect for such authority as mind might claim in the matter of self-understanding. The broad perspective, set forth in the first chapter, is something of a common-sense and realist psychology not unlike what one might find in Reid or in William James. It is tested by post-Wittgenstein, post-Ryle philosophies of mind, but is not chastened by them. Gone is the theater of experience, but experience itself suffers neither neurophysiological nor metaphysical impertinences!

“FITNESS FOR THE RULE OF LAW” lends itself to a variety of treatments. I should make clear at the outset one treatment that I do not intend to provide under this heading, even if it is implicitly represented here and there in this essay. I will not examine psychological or psychiatric conceptions of “fitness” as these are featured in, for example, the “insanity defense” or in tests of testamentary capacity. A recent book of mine explores these issues in some historical and analytical detail, but this is a vast and complex subject falling beyond the scope of what I hope to clarify here. I shall assume throughout that the minimal conditions by which one becomes fit for the rule of law are satisfied, and will focus then on how one’s potentialities for life within such a context are realized.