McDougall

McDougall is gut

This post will try to consider William McDougall's place in the network of ideas in the American social sciences.
It will try to describe a series of frameworks to situate McDougall's life and work.

McDougall has recently been revived by contemporary philosophers of science for articulating a pluralistic account of biological processes which contends against mechanism and mind/body dualism

Something I have wondered in passing, but perhaps should now explore more carefully, is McDougall's relation to Oxford idealism and to the political theory of the early 20th century known as pluralism.

A first thought as to the meta significance of the project.

One of the striking things about McDougall is that he is such a born insider - wealthy, gentrified, tweed-coast Englishman - who is always on the outside. He is clearly on the periphery of the Cambridge scene, he never fits in at Oxford (where the philosophers look down on the science of psychology), and he never manages to make it in America - where he seems to be marginalized and characterized as an arrogant Englishman.

Two angles: space and time.