Between vision and reality: reassessing Jewish agricultural colony projects in nineteenth century America

This article reassesses the story of agricultural colonies established by Jews, for Jews, in the USA during the nineteenth century. Well established Jews developed schemes to settle recent Jewish immigrants on the soil. These schemes were characterized by unrealistic expectations, bad planning, and, when implemented, frequent failures. Yet, Jewish agricultural colonies must be distinguished from Christian, proto-Socialist or other utopian projects. The sponsors of Jewish colonies in the USA did not strive for separation from general society. Rather, they sought to assist Jewish integration through settlement on the land. The conceptual framework of Jewish productivization in America closely echoed the discourse of emancipation in Central Europe.     

Fictional women physicians in the nineteenth century: The struggle for self-identity

By the late nineteenth century, there were large numbers of women physicians in the United States. Three Realist novels of the time, Dr. Breen's Practice, by William Dean Howells, Dr. Zay, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and A Country Doctor, by Sarah Orne Jewett, feature women doctors as protagonists. The issues in these novels mirrored current issues in medicine and society. By contrasting the lives of these fictional women doctors to their historical counterparts, it is seen that, while the novels are good attempts to be truthful treatments of women physicians' struggles, in certain areas they do not accurately address the concerns of women physicians.     

Psychology and gender at the turn of the century

The turn of the 20th century in America was a period of changing gender ideals. The younger generation of women pressed for economic independence and political rights. Men became caught up with the virility and physicality of the new standard of passionate manhood. These gender shifts were reflected in turn-of-the-century American psychology. With men dominating the discipline, the emerging scientific psychology projected the values of the new man. Several examples of this androcentric psychology are reviewed, including the views of such prominent psychologists as G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, and William James. There were also a few women psychologists who challenged the androcentric bias by attempting to incorporate the values of the new woman, most notably Mary Whiton Calkins, Helen Thompson Woolley, and Leta Stetter Hollingworth.     

Psychological instruments at the turn of the century

Psychology at the turn of the last century was primarily a natural science in its approach. Its goals paralleled those of experimental physiology and physics that had been so successful earlier in the 19th century. The use of scientific instruments to produce stimuli and record responses in psychological experiments became the hallmark for this new psychology of the laboratory. The origins, role, and significance of some of these instruments are discussed as well as the role of instrument makers and their patrons.     

Philosophy of psychology at the turn of the century

The philosophy of psychology at the turn of the century was an amalgam of perspectives and commitments--experimental science, Darwinian theory, positivism--forged partly out of achievements in experimental science and partly in response to transcendentalist (Hegelian) challenges. The amalgam itself appeared as an early version of the positivism that became developed and dominant early in the 20th century. For many psychologists at the turn of the century, experimental science, as practiced chiefly in physics and chemistry, was tantamount to a philosophy of science and one stripped of what were taken to be distracting and useless metaphysical quibbles. The assets and liabilities of this allegiance were recognized even as it was forming.     

Sickness in spoon river: Village health at the turn of the century

Edgar Lee Masters published numerous poems, plays, and novels between 1900 and 1942; most go unread, with the exception ofSpoon River Anthology, which is among the most popular works of American poetry of the twentieth century. This collection of poems tells of the lives of the inhabitants of a fictional American town—Spoon River, Illinois. Many of the poems consider sickness and health in the community, and the insight they offer into human responses to illness continues to be relevant today, contributing not only to the lasting popularity ofSpoon River Anthology, but also the literary value of the work.     

Before ethics: scientific accounts of action at the turn of the century

This paper traces the intellectual trajectories of the first stand-alone theories of action, understood as both axiologically neutral and quasi-scientific from a methodological point of view. I argue that the rise of action theory of this kind corresponds to a particular moment of dissatisfaction within Western thought, and as such, it tells us far more about the history of philosophy than the subject itself. I conclude by explaining why subsequent failures to provide an acceptable theory of action are not accidental. On the contrary, such failures owe themselves probably to the fact that formulating a theory of action is neither propitious nor useful. Thus, the most valuable lesson we can learn from philosophical desires for a theory of action is that we should take co-action as the starting point in our normative investigations, rather than positing action simpliciter as a problem to solve. That is, instead of postulating a theory of action, we should think of a paradigm shift, whereby we move away from a representational paradigm in philosophy towards a co-actional one.     

Personality, person, subject in Russian legal philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century

The problem of the legal person is a central issue in legal philosophy and the theory of law. In this article I examine the semantic meaning of the concept of the person in Russian philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, considered to be the “Golden Age” of Russian legal thought. This provides an overview of the conception of the personality in the context of different legal approaches (theory of natural law, legal positivism, the psychological legal doctrine, and the sociological school of law). I indicate a polemic among the theories of the person and attempts to create an integral concept of the legal subject. In addition I present an analysis of the relation between the concepts of the legal subject and the moral person, which personify fundamental features of law and morality. In order to demarcate the notions of individual and the legal subject, I focus on doctrines of the artificial person or the juridical person.     

The psychology laboratory at the turn of the 20th century

The author provides a brief history of the psychology laboratory from 1879 to 1900, discusses its crucial role in the founding of scientific psychology, and describes how it enabled psychology's separation from philosophy. The laboratory model is described as a research and graduate training enterprise that operated with K. Danziger's (1990) concept of a "community of scholars" and was eventually extended to the training of undergraduate students.