Woodbridge Riley: Difference between revisions

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'''Papers'''
'''Papers'''


*Woodbridge, Riley. (1909). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2011112 ''Transcendentalism and Pragmatism: A Comparative Study'']. ''The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods'' 6 (10): 263-266.</ref>
*Woodbridge, Riley. (1905). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2010577 ''Recent Theories of Genius'']. ''The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods'' 2 (13): 345-352.
*Woodbridge, Riley. (1909). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2011112 ''Transcendentalism and Pragmatism: A Comparative Study'']. ''The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods'' 6 (10): 263-266.


==References==
==References==

Revision as of 10:16, 10 November 2017

Isaac Woodbridge Riley (born May 20, 1869 - September 2, 1933)[1] was an American historian of philosophy whose studies of Mormonism and Christian Science made him a focus of controversy. Most of his career was spent as a professor at Vassar College.

Biography

Riley was born in New York City. He graduated from Yale University in 1892, and took the degrees of A.M. and Ph.D. there in 1898 and 1902 respectively.[2] He was Johnston research scholar at Johns Hopkins University in 1904-07, and in 1908 became professor of philosophy at Vassar. After 1903, he was associate editor of the Psychological Bulletin.[2]

Riley's Ph.D. thesis at Yale was The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, published in 1902.[2] It was positively reviewed in psychology journals.[3] Riley suspected that Joseph Smith acquired his visions from epileptic seizures. He wrote that the "psychiatric definition of the epileptic fits the prophet to a dot."[4] He associated Smith's dictation of the Book of Mormon with the phenomenon of automatic writing.[5]

Criticism of Christian Science

He is known for his book The Faith, the Falsity and the Failure of Christian Science (1925), co-authored with physician Charles Edward Humiston and lawyer Frederick William Peabody. The book argues that Christian Science has no scientific legitimacy, it also records many cases of death caused by its practitioners due to lack of medical treatment.[6]

Riley argued that Mary Baker Eddy plagiarized her ideas from Franz Mesmer, Phineas Quimby and the Shakers.[7]

Publications

Books

Papers

References

  1. ^ Shook, John R. (2005). Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. Volume 1. Thoemmes Continuum. p. 2053. ISBN 1-84371-037-4
  2. ^ a b c "Woodbridge Riley". Retrieved 10 November 2017.
  3. ^ Anonymous. (1903). Review of The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr. Psychological Review 10 (1): 69-70.
  4. ^ Aron, Paul. (2006). Mysteries in History: From Prehistory to the Present. ABC-CLIO. p. 248. ISBN 1-85109-899-2
  5. ^ Vogel, Dan. (2004). Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet. Signature Books. p. 10. ISBN 978-1-56085-179-0
  6. ^ Ravenel, M. P. (1926). The Faith, the Falsity and the Failure of Christian Science. American Journal of Public Health 16 (2): 168–169.
  7. ^ Anonymous. (1925). The Faith, The Falsity and The Failure of Christian Science. JAMA 85 (12): 924.
Attribution
  • This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainRines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Riley, (Isaac) Woodbridge" . Encyclopedia Americana.