Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill

William Glassman is a professor of Psychology at the Ryerson
Polytechnical Institute.

As its title implies, Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John
Stuart Mill attempts to address issues relevant to both philosophy and
psychology.

While nearly all psychologists realize the historical debt owed to
philosophers like Mill, most are likely not clear how the theories might
relate to their own work. By providing a background and context to
Mill’s work, Wilson clarifies this relationship. Introspective
analysis, as advanced by Mill, was the foundation for the work of Wundt
and other early psychological researchers, as Wilson describes.

The book provides thoughtful reading. There are, however, other points
that may raise questions. The most fundamental problem, as Wilson
acknowledges, is that the issues Mill examined are now seen as empirical
(experimental) questions, not philosophical ones. To justify the
continued relevance of Mill’s work for psychology, Wilson discusses
Mill’s doctrine of parallelism, and argues it provided the foundation
for behaviorism. Most psychologists today, however, likely reject
parallelism, and in any case, behaviorism has been supplanted by
cognitive science as the dominant force in psychology.

Perhaps this book simply points out that further dialogue is needed
between philosophy and psychology, and that both might gain thereby.
Wilson has done an admirable job of opening the discussion.