James Baldwin, Lionel Trilling, American Studies, and the Freudian Tragic

The hiring of James Mark Baldwin and James Gibson Hume at the University of Toronto in 1889.

In 1889, George Paxton Young, the University of Toronto's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the merits of hiring Canadians in preference to American and British applicants for faculty positions. As a result, the process of replacing Young turned into a continuation of that argument, becoming quite vociferous and involving the popular press and...

William James as American Plato ?

Alfred North Whitehead wrote a letter to Charles Hartshorne in 1936 in which he referred to William James as the American Plato. Especially given Whitehead’s admiration of Plato, this was a high compliment to James. What was the basis for this compliment and analogy? In responding to that question beyond the partial and scattered references provided by Whitehead, this article briefly explores t...

Beyond the Baldwin Effect: James Mark Baldwin’s ‘social heredity’, epigenetic inheritance and niche-construction

James Mark Baldwin is remembered today almost exclusively for his paper ‘A New Factor in Evolution’ (Baldwin, 1896a). The new factor, which he called ‘organic selection’ and which later became known as the Baldwin effect, was a process that could cause ‘accomodations’ the acquired adaptive responses of individual organisms to become hereditary. ‘Accomodations’ include physiological adaptations ...

James mark Baldwin with alfred north whitehead on organic selectivity: the “novel” factor in evolution

the aim of this paper is to show how James mark Baldwin’s theory of organic selection (also known as the “Baldwin effect”) can be fruitfully integrated with alfred north whitehead’s speculative philosophy, as part of the endeavor to develop a comprehensive process-relational evolutionary cosmology. in so doing, it provides an overview of the theory of organic selection and points to several con...

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (review)