Basic Biographical Information
James Mark Baldwin was born in 1861 to a well-to-do Presbyterian family in South Carolina. He began his career at the University of Princeton within the intellectual atmosphere of the Scottish School of Common Sense advocated by James McCosh. Like other psychologists of his generation, he traveled to Europe and became familiar with the experimental psychology of Wundt. He also came in contact with the philosophy of Spinoza and the French psychology of the time, which he was especially interested in. Otherwise his education developed within the atmosphere of the newly formed school of North American functionalism and was especially concerned with giving a place to psychology within evolution. He was a professor at Lake Forest University, the University of Toronto, Princeton and Johns Hopkins University, as well as the École des Hautes Études of Paris.
As a result of the influences that he received, Baldwin distanced himself from the psychology of the...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Primary Sources
Baldwin, J. M. (1894). Mental development in the child and the race. New York: Macmillan.
Baldwin, J. M. (1896). A new factor in evolution. The American Naturalist, 30, 441–451, 536–553.
Baldwin, J. M. (1897). Social and ethical interpretations in mental development. New York: Macmillan.
Baldwin, J. M. (1902). Development and evolution. New York: Macmillan.
Baldwin, J. M. (1906–1911). Thought and things. A study of the development and meaning of thought, or genetic logic (3 Vols.). New York: Macmillan.
Secondary Sources
Broughton, J. M., & Freeman-Moir, D. J. (Eds.). (1982). The cognitive-developmental psychology of James Mark Baldwin. Current theory and research in genetic epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hinton, G. E., & Nowlan, S. J. (1987). How learning can guide evolution. Complex Sistems, 1, 495–502.
Richards, R. J. (1987). Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sánchez, J. C., & Loredo, J. C. (2007). In circles we go. Baldwin´s theory of organic selection and its current uses: a constructivist view. Theory and Psychology, 17, 33–58.
Valsiner, J., & Van der Veer, R. (2000). The social mind. Construction of the idea. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, B. H., & Depew, D. J. (Eds.). (2003). Evolution and learning. The baldwin effect reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003). Developmental plasticity and evolution. Oxford, NJ: Oxford University Press.
Wozniak, R. H. (2009). Consciousness, social heredity, and development. The evolutionary thought of James Mark Baldwin. The American Psychologist, 64, 93–101.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this entry
Cite this entry
Sánchez-González, J.C., Loredo-Narciandi, J.C. (2012). Baldwin, J. M.. In: Rieber, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8_163
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8_163
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-0425-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-0463-8
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science