Daniel N. Robinson

Introduction

Daniel Nicholas Robinson (March 9, 1937 – September 17, 2018) was an American psychologist and philosopher who spent a career asking whether psychology had understood its own foundations. He began as a neuropsychologist studying information processing in the visual system, and he ended as a philosopher of mind, an Aristotelian moral realist and one of the most fluent lecturers in either discipline. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and, for a quarter of a century, a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Robinson is known chiefly for An Intellectual History of Psychology, a book that has introduced several generations of students to the idea that psychology's past is a sequence of philosophical commitments rather than a march toward method. He is also remembered as a critic — of the claim that neuroscience explains human action, of the idea that psychology's history began in Leipzig in 1879, and of what he took to be the discipline's willingness to mistake measurement for understanding.

Early Life and Education

Robinson was born in Monticello, New York, and graduated from Colgate University. He then did doctoral work in neuropsychology at the newly established Graduate Center of the City University of New York, completing his PhD in 1965 — the first doctorate the Graduate Center ever awarded. The ceremony had only two graduates. Robinson returned in 2009 to receive the institution's Distinguished Alumni Award and to hood its honorary ten-thousandth graduate.

His early publications were experimental: work on information processing in the visual system and the central nervous system. That training never left him. Unlike many philosophers of psychology, Robinson had run experiments and knew what a reaction time was, which is part of why his later criticisms of the field carried weight among scientists as well as humanists.

Academic and Professional Career

Robinson held posts at Amherst College, Princeton University and Columbia University, the last as adjunct professor of psychology. His main academic home was Georgetown University, where he served on the faculty for thirty years and from which he retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy.

From 1991 until his death he lectured annually at Oxford, where he was a philosophy faculty fellow. His Oxford lectures on Locke, Hume and Kant remain available online and are among the most widely heard recordings of philosophical lecturing in English. Oxford's posthumous tribute singled out the wit and lucidity of the performances.

He reached a much larger audience through broadcasting and recorded teaching. He was principal consultant to PBS and the BBC for their series The Brain and The Mind, and he recorded extensively for The Great Courses, where his survey of the great ideas of psychology became a standard introductory text.

Within the profession he was president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association — the Division of the History of Psychology, which gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, which gave him its Distinguished Contribution Award. In 2011 he received the APA's Joseph Gittler Award for contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychology. He edited the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and published original research on American constitutional history in the International Journal of Constitutional Law and the American Journal of Jurisprudence.

He wrote or edited more than forty books, though counts vary; some obituaries put the figure at fifty-two, presumably including editions and edited volumes.

Major Contributions to Psychology

An Intellectual History of Psychology

First published in 1976 and revised across four editions, this is the book Robinson is known for. It traces thinking about the mind from the ancient world forward, and it does so on the assumption that the interesting unit of analysis is the idea rather than the discovery. Ernest Hilgard's much-quoted praise — that the reader is "carried along on a genuine intellectual adventure" — is also a description of the book's character: it is an argument as much as a survey.

The argument is that psychology's self-image is historically false. Robinson rejected the founding myth that the discipline became a science when Wilhelm Wundt opened a laboratory, on the grounds that the questions Wundt asked were philosophical and that the experimental techniques he used did not answer them.

Philosophical psychology and the critique of neuroscience

Across The Enlightened Machine, Philosophy of Psychology and a long series of papers, Robinson pressed the case that mental terms cannot be reduced to neural ones. His 2013 paper "Big brains and Boskops: Phrenology lives!" made the point polemically: contemporary neuroscience, he argued, repeats the phrenologist's error of supposing that locating a function explains it, and it does so most visibly in the "locus of moral decision-making" literature and in arguments against volition drawn from Libet's experiments.

This is the context for his substance dualism — the position that mind and brain are distinct. He defended it explicitly and at length, against the near-universal physicalism of contemporary philosophy of mind.

Moral realism, law and the insanity defense

Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Application (2002) is his major statement in ethics: moral judgements, he argued, can be objectively right or wrong, and the practice of praise and blame presupposes that they are. Jude Dougherty's review in Review of Metaphysics called the work's richness impossible to absorb in one reading.

The same interest in responsibility produced Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present (1996), which traces the defense through religious, literary, medical and political history. Michael Perlin called it "truly unique"; the book's thesis is that the defense cannot be understood from legal materials alone.

Aristotle and the psychology of the ancients

Aristotle's Psychology (1989) argued that the De Anima remains a live option for psychology, precisely because Aristotle did not separate the study of the soul from the study of living beings. Deborah Modrak's assessment — easy to read and informative — captures the book's reputation as a serious but accessible revival.

A footnote in the history of positive psychology

Robinson was among the small group that Martin Seligman assembled in 1999 to sketch out the framework for positive psychology. His presence in that room is a reminder that the movement's founders included a moral philosopher with Aristotelian commitments, and not only researchers in learned helplessness.

Major Publications

Robinson, D. N. (1976). An Intellectual History of Psychology. Macmillan. (4th ed., University of Wisconsin Press / Continuum.)
Robinson, D. N. (1979). Systems of Modern Psychology: A Critical Sketch. Columbia University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (1980). The Enlightened Machine: An Analytical Introduction to Neuropsychology. Columbia University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (1980). Psychology and Law: Can Justice Survive the Social Sciences? Oxford University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (1985). Philosophy of Psychology. Columbia University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (1989). Aristotle's Psychology. Columbia University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (1996). Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present. Harvard University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (2002). Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Application. Princeton University Press.
Robinson, D. N. (2008). Consciousness and Mental Life. Columbia University Press.

Impact and Legacy

Robinson's legacy splits cleanly in two. As a teacher and broadcaster his reach was enormous: his Oxford lectures, his Great Courses series and his work with PBS and the BBC brought philosophy of mind to audiences that no journal article would ever reach, and the unanimous note in obituaries is about clarity and wit rather than doctrine.

As a theorist his influence is concentrated in a narrow band. Within the history and philosophy of psychology he is a canonical figure and his Intellectual History remains assigned. Outside it he is barely cited, and his central positions remain minority ones.

The criticisms are correspondingly structural rather than personal. Substance dualism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of philosophers of mind and by all working neuroscientists, and Robinson's critics argue that he never met the strongest form of the evidence against it — the systematic, graded dependence of specific mental capacities on specific neural damage. His dualism functions in his work as a framework for interpreting that evidence rather than as a hypothesis tested against it.

His critique of neuroscience has drawn the related charge of attacking a straw target. Cognitive neuroscientists reply that they do not claim to explain moral judgement or social behaviour by naming a brain region; they claim that lesion, stimulation and imaging data constrain which psychological theories can be true. Robinson's "phrenology lives" formulation is memorable, and his readers have found it useful, but it describes a position almost nobody defends. The Libet material is a case in point: Libet himself did not conclude that volition is an illusion, and the subsequent literature has been considerably more careful than the popular version of it that Robinson criticised.

His history has a third and gentler objection. An Intellectual History of Psychology is written from a settled standpoint — broadly Aristotelian, broadly sceptical about the experimental mainstream — and reviewers have noted that it gives short measure to the empirical achievements of twentieth-century psychology. It is, in other words, a book that changes minds partly by selection and emphasis rather than by argument alone, which is why teachers who assign it often assign a second, more conventional history alongside it.

Robinson would probably have accepted all of this as the price of having a position. His own dictum, quoted by The Great Courses, was that developments in philosophy take "chiefly the form of greater clarity, an ever more refined sense of just what makes the problem problematic" — and that if ignorance is not thereby overcome, at least it is exposed.

Learn More

Wilhelm Wundt — the founding narrative of experimental psychology that Robinson contested
B. F. Skinner — behaviourism, the movement his history treated as a philosophical dead end
Martin Seligman — who convened the 1999 group that launched positive psychology
Sigmund Freud — the other great nineteenth-century psychology of the mind