Edwin Bissett Holt

Background

Holt, Edwin Bissett was born in 1873 in Winchester, Massachusetts, United States.

Education

Harvard University.

Career

Lecturer and Professor of Pyschology, Harvard. 1901-1918; Professor of Social Psychology, Princeton. 1926-1936.

Views

Holt was, with R. B. Perry, the leader of the group who put out the manifesto The New Realism in 1912 and was the most radical and uncompromising of them. He followed William James's neutral monism in his doctrine that ‘being’ is the basic category, which is neither mental nor material itself, the term denoting everything, but connoting nothing. The simple elements of which everything is composed are of the nature of essences or concepts; they are not, as with James, 'experiences’, an identification which made James’ neutral monism subjective or mentalistic in character. They are the constituents of mental and material complexes. Thought and representation, the having of ideas, are not any sort of copying or imitation of what there is but a matter of partial identity. An idea is part of what it is an idea of. From this it followed. Holt was ready to admit, that reality as a whole was littered with errors and contradictions. The picking out of a coherent order from the confused array of simples Holt saw as a conventional undertaking of no great ontological significance. He took consciousness in a more or less behaviourist way as the 'interested response of an organism', a notion obviously difficult to reconcile with the doctrine that an idea is part of the thing it is an idea of. Even if the body is the perceiver, rather than some disembodied cognitive soul, it is clearly quite distinct from much o! what it perceives. Holt turned away from the theory of knowledge after The Concept of Consciousness (1914). He argued that unconscious, Freudian desire is the fundamental topic ot psychology, not sensation or any other conscious item, developing his behaviouristic conception ol the mind as what the body can do, linking his position to Aristotle's doctrine of the soul as the ‘form’ of the body. He wound up with a purely materialistic theory of the mind as nerves and muscles. Holt was too uncompromising and unwilling to respond to criticism and difficulties to make any converts. He contributed, however, in his somewhat freebooting way to the general transformation of psychology into a science ol behaviour.

Interests

• Philosophy of mind.

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  William James.