The latest issue of the American Journal of Psychology includes an article from Chris Green on the competition between Charles Sanders Peirce, George Sylvester Morris, and Granville Stanley Hall for the first professorship in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. He argues that the outcome of this race profoundly affected the character of experimental psychology in America.

In the present article I present a month-by-month account of the intense struggle to claim what was probably the most sought-after philosophical position in the country and how the contingencies of personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as institutional anxieties, had as much to do with the ultimate outcome—and thus with the future development of American psychology—as any scientific or other intellectual considerations that were at play.

(Voluntary disclosure: Chris Green serves as the Faculty Advisor for AHP.)

-JTB.