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Review: Beyond Rationalist Theories of the Mind

Here is a preeminently Jamesean text that argues for the supremacy of experience over all our piecemeal scientific models, at least for now. It has been produced by an erudite scholar of Western thought, author of 50 books, and the first to answer Gordon Allport’s call for a full-bodied intellectual history of psychology that was relatively free of the experimentalist’s parochialism demonstrated by the great Edwin G. Boring. The present work is Robinson’s statement on current debates in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind regarding the nature of consciousness. The first big question that he tackles is why the ancient philosophers did not address the phenomena of consciousness or acknowledge that there was any such thing as a mind/body problem. That these are preeminently modern questions in my opinion is because they have become codified by a hardened epistemology in the West defined by the so-called Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Western European, and Anglo-American definition of reality that has crept up on us progressively and now constrains us to think only in one way, based on the supremacy of reason. After all, Asian systems of thought have been dealing with consciousness and its transformations for thousands of years, a fact still unknown to evolutionary behaviorists such as Daniel Dennett (Robinson’s piñata) or the evolutionary delusionist, Richard Dawkins (Emma Sutton’s bête noire). The result has been our specialty—science defined as the rational ordering of sense data alone, over-generalized to the whole, making us a brainy culture able to answer any question with a big enough grant and some cachet with science, but bereft of any sense of our innards, aesthetics, meaning, and the larger mystery of things. While Robinson stays within the Western paradigm, he definitely comes down on the side of the mystery of things, having already established himself as a world-class scholar of the Western variety whose humble beginnings can be found in physiological psychology. After all these years of addressing the big questions, first from this angle, then from that, Robinson comes now with a full armamentarium to address the phenomena of consciousness itself, the thing that makes science in the first place. Indeed, the work