A Reflection on Robert M. Young

Abstract

As a general thesis, Bob held the view that humanism was lost into human nature, and human nature was lost into nature, where nature lay outside a humanistic urge to do good. That is a line that carries from his early work on phrenology to his latest on psychoanalysis. His first book, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the 19^th Century (1970), a book centred on the place of phrenology and brain localization research within a biological and philosophical context, begins the exploration of the slippage of human nature into nature as an alien environment. Over the years, he came adamantly to oppose this trend and aimed to reverse it.