West Coast History of Science Society Meeting
University of California, San Francisco
April 11th - April 14th, 2002
[Program]
Emerson Hall and Philosophical Psychology: A Unified Home for a Unified ScienceSusan Marie Groppi
University of California, BerkeleyEmerson Hall at Harvard was constructed just after the turn of the century as a home for the philosophy department, which at the time contained the experimental psychology program. At the building's dedication ceremony in 1905, the chair of the philosophy department declared that the building was providing a unified home for a unified discipline. His belief was that housing philosophy and psychology under the same literal roof had an important symbolic meaning for the relationship between psychology and philosophy at Harvard. Harvard's psychology program was something of an exception in this regard; other experimental psychology programs were making a great effort to establish themselves as natural sciences far removed from philosophy. In this paper, I examine the building itself and the discussion surrounding its construction and purpose, in the hopes that Emerson Hall can be seen as a physical focus for one aspect of early American psychology.