Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own. Though there are philosophical approaches to issues raised in such discussions, theory of mind as such is distinct from the philosophy of mind.

Defining theory of mind

Theory of mind is a theory insofar as the mind is not directly observable. and understanding of others' emotions and actions. Having a theory of mind allows one to attribute thoughts, desires, and intentions to others, to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. As originally defined, it enables one to understand that mental states can be the cause of—and thus be used to explain and predict—others’ behavior. If a person does not have a complete theory of mind it may be a sign of cognitive or developmental impairment.

Theory of mind appears to be an innate potential ability in humans, but one requiring social and other experience over many years to bring to fruition. Different people may develop more, or less, effective theories of mind. Empathy is a related concept, meaning experientially recognizing and understanding the states of mind, including beliefs, desires and particularly emotions of others, often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes." Recent neuro ethological studies of animal behaviour, suggest even rodents may exhibit ethical or empathic abilities. Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development maintain that theory of mind is a byproduct of a broader hypercognitive ability of the human mind to register, monitor, and represent its own functioning.

Research on theory of mind in a number of different populations (human and animal, adults and children, normally- and atypically-developing) has grown rapidly in the almost 30 years since Premack and Woodruff's paper, "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?", as have the theories of theory of mind. The emerging field of social neuroscience has also begun to address this debate, by imaging humans while performing tasks demanding the understanding of an intention, belief or other mental state.

An alternative account of theory of mind (ToM) is given within operant psychology and provides significant empirical evidence for a functional account of both perspective taking and empathy. The most developed operant approach is founded on research on derived relational responding and is subsumed within what is called, "Relational Frame Theory." According to this view empathy and perspective taking comprise a complex set of derived relational abilities based on learning to discriminate and verbally respond to ever more complex relations between self, others, place, and time, and the transformation of function through established relations.

Philosophical roots

Contemporary discussions of ToM have their roots in philosophical debate—most broadly, from the time of Descartes’ "Second Meditation," which set the groundwork for considering the science of the mind. Most prominent recently are two contrasting approaches, in the philosophical literature, to theory of mind: theory-theory and simulation theory. The theory-theorist imagines a veritable theory—"folk psychology"—used to reason about others' minds. The theory is developed automatically and innately, though instantiated through social interactions.

On the other hand, simulation theory suggests ToM is not, at its core, theoretical. Two kinds of simulationism have been proposed. One version (Alvin Goldman's) emphasizes that one must recognize one's own mental states before ascribing mental states to others by simulation. The second version of simulation theory proposes that each person comes to know his or her own and others' minds through what Robert Gordon

Theory of mind development

The study of which animals are capable of attributing knowledge and mental states to others, as well as when in human ontogeny and phylogeny this ability developed, has identified a number of precursory behaviors to a theory of mind. Understanding attention, understanding of others' intentions, and imitative experience with other people are hallmarks of a theory of mind which may be observed early in the development of what will later become a full-fledged theory. In studies with non-human animals and pre-verbal humans, in particular, researchers look to these behaviors preferentially in making inferences about mind.

Baron-Cohen identified the infant's understanding of attention in others, a social skill found by 7 to 9 months of age, as a "critical precursor" to the development of theory of mind. Understanding attention involves understanding that seeing can be directed selectively as attention, that the looker assesses the seen object as "of interest," and that seeing can induce beliefs. Attention can be directed and shared by the act of pointing, a joint attention behavior which requires taking into account another person's mental state, particularly whether the person notices an object or finds it of interest. Baron-Cohen speculates that the inclination to spontaneously reference an object in the world as of interest ("proto-declarative pointing") and to likewise appreciate the directed attention and interests of another may be the underlying motive behind all human communication. as an understanding that others' actions are goal-directed and arise from particular beliefs or desires. Both 2- and 3-year-old children could discriminate when an experimenter intentionally vs. accidentally marked a box as baited with stickers. Even earlier in ontogeny, Andrew N. Meltzoff found that 18 month-old infants could perform target manipulations that adult experimenters attempted and failed, suggesting the infants could represent the object-manipulating behavior of adults as involving goals and intentions. While attribution of intention (the box-marking) and knowledge (false-belief tasks) is investigated in young humans and nonhuman animals to detect precursors to a theory of mind, Gagliardi et al. have pointed out that even adult humans do not always act in a way consistent with an attributional perspective. In the experiment, adult human subjects came to make choices about baited containers when guided by confederates who could not see (and therefore, not know) which container had been baited.

Recent research in developmental psychology suggests that the infant's ability to imitate others lies at the origins of both a theory of mind and other social-cognitive achievements like perspective-taking and empathy. According to Meltzoff, the infant's innate understanding that others are "like me" allows it to recognize the equivalence between the physical and mental states apparent in others and those felt by the self. For example, the infant uses his own experiences orienting his head/eyes toward an object of interest to understand the movements of others who turn toward an object, that is, that they will generally attend to objects of interest or significance. Some researchers in comparative disciplines have hesitated to put a too-ponderous weight on imitation as a critical precursor to advanced human social-cognitive skills like mentalizing and empathizing, especially if true imitation is no longer employed by adults. A test of imitation by Horowitz found that adult subjects imitated an experimenter demonstrating a novel task far less closely than children subjects did. Horowitz points out that the precise psychological state underlying imitation is unclear and cannot, by itself, be used to draw conclusions about the mental states of humans.

Empirical investigation

Whether children younger than 3 or 4 years old may have a theory of mind is a topic of debate among researchers. It is a challenging question, due to the difficulty of assessing what pre-linguistic children understand about others and the world. Tasks used in research into the development of ToM must take into account the umwelt—(the German word ''Umwelt'' means "environment" or "surrounding world")—of the pre-verbal child.

False-belief task

One of the most important milestones in theory of mind development is gaining the ability to attribute ''false belief'': that is, to recognize that others can have beliefs about the world that are diverging. To do this, it is suggested, one must understand how knowledge is formed, that people’s beliefs are based on their knowledge, that mental states can differ from reality, and that people’s behavior can be predicted by their mental states. Numerous versions of the false-belief task have been developed, based on the initial task done by Wimmer and Perner (1983).

In the most common version of the false-belief task (often called the ‘Sally-Anne’ task), children are told or shown a story involving two characters. For example, the child is shown two dolls, Sally and Anne, who have a basket and a box, respectively. Sally also has a marble, which she places in her basket, and then leaves to take a walk. While she is out of the room, Anne takes the marble from the basket, eventually putting it in the box. Sally returns, and the child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the basket, where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the box, where the child knows the marble is hidden, even though Sally cannot know, since she did not see it hidden there. In order to pass the task, the child must be able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding. The results of research using false-belief tasks have been fairly consistent: most normally-developing children are unable to pass the tasks until around age four. (Notably, while most children, including those with Down syndrome, are able to pass this "test", in one study, 80% of children diagnosed with autism were ''unable'' to do so.)

Appearance-reality task

Other tasks have been developed to try to solve the problems inherent in the false-belief task. In the "appearance-reality", or "Smarties" task, experimenters ask children what they believe to be the contents of a box that looks as though it holds a candy called "Smarties." After the child guesses (usually) "Smarties," each is shown that the box in fact contained pencils. The experimenter then re-closes the box and asks the child what she thinks another person, who has not been shown the true contents of the box, will think is inside. The child passes the task if she responds that another person will think that there are "Smarties" in the box, but fails the task if she responds that another person will think that the box contains pencils. Gopnik & Astington (1988) found that children pass this test at age four or five years.

Other tasks

The "false-photograph" task is another task that serves as a measure of theory of mind development. In this task, children must reason about what is represented in a photograph that differs from the current state of affairs. Within the false-photograph task, there is either a location or identity change. In the location-change task, the child is told a story about a character that puts an object in one location (e.g., chocolate in a green cupboard) and takes a Polaroid photograph of the scene. While the photograph is developing, the object is moved to a different location (e.g., to a blue cupboard). The child is then asked two control questions, “When we first took the picture, where was the object? Where is the object now?” The subject is also asked a false-photograph question, “Where is the object in the picture?” The child passes the task if she correctly identifies the location of the object in the picture and the actual location of the object at the time of the question.

In order to make tasks more accessible for young children, non-human animals, and autistic individuals, theory of mind research has begun employing non-verbal paradigms. One category of tasks uses a preferential looking paradigm, with looking time as the dependent variable. For instance, Woodward found that 9-month-old infants preferred looking at behaviors performed by a human hand over those made by an inanimate hand-like object. Other paradigms look at rates of imitative behavior, the ability to replicate and complete unfinished goal-directed acts,

Theory of mind deficits

The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as ''mind-blindness''. This means that individuals with a ToM impairment would have a hard time seeing things from any other perspective than their own. Individuals who experience a theory of mind deficit have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and have a difficult time with social reciprocity. ToM deficits have been observed in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenics, persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, sleep-deprived persons, and persons who are experiencing severe emotional or physical pain.

Autism

In 1985 Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie and Uta Frith published research which suggested that children with autism do not employ a theory of mind, Researchers who study the relationship between autism and theory of mind attempt to explain the connection in a variety of ways. One account assumes that theory of mind plays a role in the attribution of mental states to others and in childhood pretend play. According to Leslie, theory of mind is the capacity to mentally represent thoughts, beliefs, and desires, regardless of whether or not the circumstances involved are real. This might explain why individuals with autism show extreme deficits in both theory of mind and pretend play. However, Hobson proposes a social-affective justification, which suggests that a person with autism deficits in theory of mind result from a distortion in understanding and responding to emotions. He suggests that typically developing human beings, unlike individuals with autism, are born with a set of skills (such as social referencing ability) which will later enable them to comprehend and react to other people’s feelings. Other scholars emphasize that autism involves a specific developmental delay, so that children with the impairment vary in their deficiencies, because they experience difficulty in different stages of growth. Very early setbacks can alter proper advancement of joint-attention behaviors, which may lead to a failure to form a full theory of mind.

Brain mechanisms

In typically developing humans

Research on theory of mind in autism led to the view that mentalizing abilities are subserved by dedicated mechanisms that can (in some cases) be impaired while general cognitive function remains largely intact. Neuroimaging research has supported this view, demonstrating specific brain regions consistently engaged during theory of mind tasks. Early PET research on theory of mind, using verbal and pictorial story comprehension tasks, identified a set of regions including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and area around posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), and sometimes precuneus and amygdala/temporopolar cortex (reviewed in ). Subsequently, research on the neural basis of theory of mind has diversified, with separate lines of research focused on the understanding of beliefs, intentions, and more complex properties of minds such as psychological traits.

Studies from Rebecca Saxe's lab at MIT, using a false belief versus false photograph task contrast aimed to isolate the mentalizing component of the false belief task, have very consistently found activation in mPFC, precuneus, and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), right-lateralized. In particular, it has been proposed that the right TPJ (rTPJ) is selectively involved in representing the beliefs of others. However, some debate exists, as some scientists have noted that the same rTPJ region has been consistently activated during spatial reorienting of visual attention; Jean Decety from the University of Chicago and Jason Mitchell from Harvard have thus proposed that the rTPJ subserves a more general function involved in both false belief understanding and attentional reorienting, rather than a mechanism specialized for social cognition. However, it is possible that the observation of overlapping regions for representing beliefs and attentional reorienting may simply be due to adjacent but distinct neuronal populations that code for each. The resolution of typical fMRI studies may not be good enough to show that distinct/adjacent neuronal populations code for each of these processes. In a study following Decety and Mitchell, Saxe and colleagues used higher-resolution fMRI and showed that the peak of activation for attentional reorienting is approximately 6-10mm above the peak for representing beliefs. Further corroborating that differing populations of neurons may code for each process, they found no similarity in the patterning of fMRI response across space.

Functional imaging has also been used to study the detection of mental state information in Heider-Simmel-esque animations of moving geometric shapes, which typical humans automatically perceive as social interactions laden with intention and emotion. Three studies found remarkably similar patterns of activation during the perception of such animations versus a random or deterministic motion control: mPFC, pSTS, fusiform face area (FFA), and amygdala were selectively engaged during the ToM condition. Another study presented subjects with an animation of two dots moving with a parameterized degree of intentionality (quantifying the extent to which the dots chased each other), and found that pSTS activation correlated with this parameter.

A separate body of research has implicated the posterior superior temporal sulcus in the perception of intentionality in human action; this area is also involved in perceiving biological motion, including body, eye, mouth, and point-light display motion (reviewed in ). One study found increased pSTS activation while watching a human lift his hand versus having his hand pushed up by a piston (intentional versus unintentional action). Several studies have found increased pSTS activation when subjects perceive a human action that is incongruent with the action expected from the actor’s context and inferred intention: for instance, a human performing a reach-to-grasp motion on empty space next to an object, versus grasping the object; a human shifting eye gaze toward empty space next to a checkerboard target versus shifting gaze toward the target; an unladen human turning on a light with his knee, versus turning on a light with his knee while carrying a pile of books; and a walking human pausing as he passes behind a bookshelf, versus walking at a constant speed. In these studies, actions in the "congruent" case have a straightforward goal, and are easy to explain in terms of the actor’s intention; the incongruent actions, on the other hand, require further explanation (why would someone twist empty space next to a gear?), and apparently demand more processing in the STS. Note that this region is distinct from the temporo-parietal area activated during false belief tasks. Also note that pSTS activation in most of the above studies was largely right-lateralized, following the general trend in neuroimaging studies of social cognition and perception: also right-lateralized are the TPJ activation during false belief tasks, the STS response to biological motion, and the FFA response to faces.

Neuropsychological evidence has provided support for neuroimaging results on the neural basis of theory of mind. A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks. This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain. However, the fact that the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction are necessary for theory of mind tasks does not imply that these regions are specific to that function. TPJ and mPFC may subserve more general functions necessary for ToM.

Research by Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga and Giacomo Rizzolatti (reviewed in ) has shown that some sensorimotor neurons, which are referred to as mirror neurons, first discovered in the premotor cortex of rhesus monkeys, may be involved in action understanding. Single-electrode recording revealed that these neurons fired when a monkey performed an action and when the monkey viewed another agent carrying out the same task. Similarly, fMRI studies with human participants have shown brain regions (assumed to contain mirror neurons) are active when one person sees another person's goal-directed action. These data have led some authors to suggest that mirror neurons may provide the basis for theory of mind in the brain, and to support simulation theory of mind reading (see above).

However, there is also evidence against the link between mirror neurons and theory of mind. First, macaque monkeys have mirror neurons but do not seem to have a 'human-like' capacity to understand theory of mind and belief. Second, fMRI studies of theory of mind typically report activation in the mPFC, temporal poles and TPJ or STS, but these brain areas are not part of the mirror neuron system. Some investigators, like developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff and neuroscientist Jean Decety, believe that mirror neurons merely facilitate learning through imitation and may provide a precursor to the development of ToM. Others, like philosopher Shaun Gallagher, suggest that mirror-neuron activation, on a number of counts, fails to meet the definition of simulation as proposed by the simulation theory of mindreading.

In autism

Several neuroimaging studies have looked at the neural basis theory of mind impairment in subjects with Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism (HFA). The first PET study of theory of mind in autism (also the first neuroimaging study using a task-induced activation paradigm in autism) employed a story comprehension task, replicating a prior study in normal individuals. This study found displaced and diminished mPFC activation in subjects with autism. However, because the study used only six subjects with autism, and because the spatial resolution of PET imaging is relatively poor, these results should be considered preliminary.

A subsequent fMRI study scanned normally developing adults and adults with HFA while performing a "reading the mind in the eyes" task—viewing a photo of a human’s eyes and choosing which of two adjectives better describes the person’s mental state, versus a gender discrimination control. The authors found activity in orbitofrontal cortex, STS, and amygdala in normal subjects, and found no amygdala activation and abnormal STS activation in subjects with autism.

A more recent PET study looked at brain activity in individuals with HFA and Asperger syndrome while viewing Heider-Simmel animations (see above) versus a random motion control. In contrast to normally developing subjects, those with autism showed no STS or FFA activation, and significantly less mPFC and amygdala activation. Activity in extrastriate regions V3 and LO was identical across the two groups, suggesting intact lower-level visual processing in the subjects with autism. The study also reported significantly less functional connectivity between STS and V3 in the autism group. Note, however, that decreased temporal correlation between activity in STS and V3 would be expected simply from the lack of an evoked response in STS to intent-laden animations in subjects with autism; a more informative analysis would be to compute functional connectivity after regressing out evoked responses from all time series.

A subsequent study, using the incongruent/congruent gaze shift paradigm described above, found that in high-functioning adults with autism, posterior STS (pSTS) activation was undifferentiated while watching a human shift gaze toward a target and toward adjacent empty space. The lack of additional STS processing in the incongruent state may suggest that these subjects fail to form an expectation of what the actor should do given contextual information, or that information about the violation of this expectation doesn’t reach STS; both explanations involve an impairment in the ability to link eye gaze shifts with intentional explanations. This study also found a significant anticorrelation between STS activation in the incongruent-congruent contrast and social subscale score on the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised, but not scores on the other subscales.

In 2011, an fMRI study demonstrated that right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) of higher-functioning adults with autism was not selectively activated more for mentalizing judgments when compared to physical judgments about self and other. rTPJ selectivity for mentalizing was also related to individual variation on clinical measures of social impairment; individuals whose rTPJ was increasingly more active for mentalizing compared to physical judgments were less socially impaired, while those who showed little to no difference in response to mentalizing or physical judgments were the most socially impaired. This evidence builds on work in typical development that suggests rTPJ is critical for representing mental state information, irrespective of whether it is about oneself or others. It also points to an explanation at the neural level for the pervasive mind-blindness difficulties in autism that are evident throughout the lifespan.

Non-human theory of mind

As the title of Premack and Woodruff's 1978 article "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?" indicates, it is also important to ask if other animals besides humans have a genetic endowment and social environment that allows them to acquire a theory of mind in the same way that human children do. This is a contentious issue because of the problem of inferring from animal behavior the existence of thinking, of the existence of a concept of self or self-awareness, or of particular thoughts. One difficulty with non-human studies of ToM is the lack of sufficient numbers of naturalistic observation, giving insight into what the evolutionary pressures might be on a species' development of theory of mind.

Non-human research still has a major place in this field, however, and is especially useful in illuminating which nonverbal behaviors signify components of theory of mind, and in pointing to possible stepping points in the evolution of what many claim to be a uniquely human aspect of social cognition. While it is difficult to study human-like theory of mind and mental states in species which we do not yet describe as "minded" at all, and about whose potential mental states we have an incomplete understanding, researchers can focus on simpler components of more complex capabilities. For example, many researchers focus on animals' understanding of intention, gaze, perspective, or knowledge (or rather, what another being has seen). Call and Tomasello's study and dogs, and have shown preliminary evidence of understanding attention—one precursor of theory of mind—in others.

There has been some controversy over the interpretation of evidence purporting to show theory of mind ability—or inability—in animals. Two examples serve as demonstration: first, Povinelli et al. (1990) presented chimpanzees with the choice of two experimenters from which to request food: one who had seen where food was hidden, and one who, by virtue of one of a variety of mechanisms (having a bucket or bag over his head; a blindfold over his eyes; or being turned away from the baiting) does not know, and can only guess. They found that the animals failed in most cases to differentially request food from the "knower." By contrast, Hare, Call, and Tomasello (2001) found that subordinate chimpanzees were able to use the knowledge state of dominant rival chimpanzees to determine which container of hidden food they approached.

See also

Autism

Cephalopod intelligence

Cetacean intelligence

Consciousness

Empathy

Identity theory of mind

Mental body

Mentalization

Mind

The Mind of an Ape

Mind-body problem

Mirror neurons

Philosophy of mind

Quantum mind

Social neuroscience

Notes

References

Excerpts taken from: Davis, E. (2007) Mental Verbs in Nicaraguan Sign Language and the Role of Language in Theory of Mind. Undergraduate senior thesis, Barnard College, Columbia University.

External links

The Computational Theory of Mind

The Identity Theory of Mind

Sally-Anne and Smarties tests

Scientists Say Everyone Can Read Minds

Functional Contextualism

*Relational Frame Theory

Category:Cognitive science Category:Theories of mind

de:Theory of Mind es:Teoría de la mente fr:Théorie de l'esprit it:Teoria della mente he:תאוריה של תודעה hu:Elmeteória nl:Theory of mind ja:心の理論 pl:Teoria umysłu ru:Модель психического sk:Teória mysle fi:Mielen teoria sv:Inlevelseförmåga tr:Zihin kuramı

Coordinates	34°03′″N118°15′″N
Name	Robert Edward Seyfarth
Nationality	American
Birth date	April 13, 1878
Birth place	Blue Island, IL, U.S.
Death date	March 01, 1950
Death place	Highland Park, IL U.S.
Significant buildings	See "Significant works" list below.
Significant projects	Plan Portfolio - ''The Home You Longed For'' - The Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau, 1918 }}

Robert Seyfarth ( ) was an American architect based in Chicago, Illinois.

Background

[[File:Seyfarth Hardware.jpg|375px|thumb|left|The three buildings on the right were owned by the Seyfarth family and stood on the south-west corner of Grove St. and Western Ave in Blue Island, IL. The white building in the center of the photograph was the tavern that William Seyfarth operated after he came to Blue Island in 1848. It originally stood on the corner, but was remodeled and relocated in 1880 when the building shown here on the corner was erected to house Edward Seyfarth's hardware store. All three buildings were destroyed in the Great Blue Island Fire of 1896, which began in a shed behind the Bairischer Hof, the building to their immediate left. The Bairischer Hof survived the fire.]] Robert Seyfarth grew up as a member of a prominent local family. His grandfather William Seyfarth had come to the United States in 1848 from Schloss Tonndorf in what is now the state of Thuringia, Germany, with the intention of opening a tavern (what would now be considered an inn) in Chicago. Advised to locate outside of the city, he settled with his wife Louise in Blue Island, which a couple of years earlier had begun to experience an influx of immigration from what was then known as the German Confederation. William purchased a building that was standing at the south-west corner of Grove Street and Western Avenue and opened his business. The location was a good one - it was on what was then called the Wabash Road a day's journey from Chicago, which guaranteed the tavern a steady supply of prosepective customers for many years. At about the same time he purchased a stone quarry about a mile south-west of the settlement (where Robbins, Illinois now stands) and operated it concurrently with the inn, although apparently without as much success. He served as clerk and later as assessor for the township of Worth from 1854 until he died in 1860. William and Louise had five sons, including Edward, who was the father of the architect. Edward Seyfarth was active in community affairs on many levels. Not only did he own and operate the local hardware store, but in 1890 he was one of the founders of the Calumet State Bank, and in 1874 was a charter member of the Blue Island Ancient Free and Accepted Masons. He served as village treasurer from 1880–1886 and as village trustee from 1886–1889 and again from 1893-1895. Over the years other members of the family were also active in the community - they were involved in banking, the board of education, and the Current Topics Club (later the Blue Island Woman's Club), who was largely responsible for the founding of the Blue Island Public Library. C. A. Seyfarth was one of the founding members of the Blue Island Elks in 1916. (The architect was himself apparently a person of catholic interests - he was an active member of the Poultry Fancier's Association during the time that Blue Island was the headquarters for the Northeastern Illinois Fancier's Association in the early years of the 20th Century. From the time his grandparents arrived in 1848 to the time Robert Seyfarth left Blue Island in about 1910 for Highland Park, the village had grown from being a pioneering hamlet of about 200 persons to a prosperous industrial suburb with a population of nearly 11,000, which the noted publisher and historian Alfred T. Andreas had called "...a quiet, though one among the prettiest little suburban towns in the West". It was in this atmosphere that Seyfarth grew up, attended primary school, married his first wife Nell Martin (1878–1928), and built their first home.

Education and career

Chicago Manual Training School

Seyfarth began his architectural education at the Chicago Manual Training School, which was founded by the Commercial Club out of a concern for the quality of the education of skilled labor in the Chicago region. The school had opened its doors on January 4, 1884 with four teachers and seventy-four pupils and the support of the sixty members of the club who had "pledged themselves to found a manual training school, and guaranteed for its construction, equipment and support [with] the sum of one hundred thousand dollars". The club, which was founded in 1877, was a group of the city's most influential leaders that included Marshall Field, George Pullman, Edson Keith, Cyrus McCormick and George Armour. The club's successor, The Commercial Club of Chicago would later sponsor Daniel Burnham and Charles Bennett's Plan of Chicago (1909), which is widely regarded as one of the most important public planning documents ever created. Chicago Manual Training School was a private secondary school and was designed to graduate its students three years from the time they entered. The student body, which was all male, was required to spend an hour each day in the drafting room and two hours a day in the shop, in addition to the time spent in classrooms studying the conventional high school curriculum. Although it was to take him in a totally different direction, Chicago Manual Training School, with its focus on the industrial arts, was a logical choice for the secondary education of the oldest son of a hardware dealer, especially in an age when primogeniture was considered important. Besides his classes in drawing Seyfarth studied mathematics, English, French, Latin, history, physics, chemistry, foundry and forgework, machine shopwork, woodwork, political economy and civil government. In 1891 the tuition averaged $100.00 per year "to those able to pay it". In 1903 the institution became part of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, operating out of CMTS (later Belfield) Hall .

Despite the fact that it was 17 miles away, Seyfarth enjoyed the advantage of the school’s convenient location. The railway depot that marked the beginning of his trip was a two-block walk from his home at Grove Street and Western Avenue, with the end of the ride being at the Illinois Central’s Twelfth Street Station, which was located directly across the street from the school. The ride would have taken him directly over the Midway Plaisance of the World's Columbian Exposition, where he would have a clear view to the west of the great Ferris Wheel and to the east of the Beaux Arts majesty of the main body of the Fair. It is difficult to imagine that to a boy from small-town America in the early 1890s this would not have created an impression and provided him with enormous inspiration, as it did the architectural world at large for the next forty years. In her book ''A Poet's Life - Seventy Years in a Changing World'', the writer, publisher and social critic Harriet Monroe succinctly noted forty-five years after the closing of the Fair that “…like all great achievements of beauty, it has become an incalculably inspiring force which lasted into the next ‘age.’

The Chicago Architectural Club

|200px|thumb|right|Page 12 from the catalog of the ''Sixteenth Annual Exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club'' (1903), showing Seyfarth's entry for a "Library". The education of an architect in the early years of the 20th century was quite different than it is today, and the ambitious prospective architect could take many avenues to acquire it. In April 1905, for example, Seyfarth attended his first meeting as a member of the Chicago Architectural Club, which had been founded in 1885 as the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club by James H. Carpenter, a prominent Chicago draftsman, with the support of the magazine ''Inland Architect'', whose first issue had been published in February 1883. The club was formed in Chicago during a period when architecture there was in its ascendancy - after the Great Fire of 1871 a large population of some of the country's best architectural talent had come to rebuild a modern city using the most advanced and progressive techniques of the day. Even so, the community was taxed trying to perform all of the work that was necessary to keep up with the task. The club was an effort to help develop the talents of the city’s many draftsmen so that they could become qualified architects themselves, at a time when a formal education for architects was generally unavailable and not required. (The first architectural school in the United States was founded by architect William Robert Ware at MIT in 1868 with nine students, and even by 1896, the year after Seyfarth's graduation, there were only nine schools in the county with a combined student body of 273.) Seyfarth joined during the time he worked for Maher, who over the years was an active member of the club as a speaker, writer, exhibitor and judge in its annual competitions. Seyfarth is known to have entered his work at two of these exhibitions - the first time in 1903 (before he became a member), when his submission was listed as a "Library", and again in 1905, where the subject of the entry was his own house in Blue Island. The preface to the catalogue of the 1905 exhibition was devoted to what the noted architect Elmer Grey (1872–1963) called "Inventive and Indigeonous Architecture", a phrase which perfectly reflected Seyfarth's design for this particular house and may have been one of the reasons why images of it were included. Because of his association with the Chicago Architectural Club, Seyfarth would have ample opportunity to become acquainted with the major players of Chicago's progressive architectural community, a large number of whom were active members. These were relationships that Maher would doubtless have encouraged. Notables among the list included Charles B. Atwood, Daniel Burnham, Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Howard Van Doren Shaw, William LeBaron Jenney and Frank Lloyd Wright. The club's headquarters for many years was located in the former mansion of the piano manufacturer William W. Kimball at 1801 Prairie Ave. in Chicago. It ceased to operate as an active organization in 1940 and was dissolved in 1967, but exists again today after it was re-formed in 1979.

Influences and early career

100px|thumb|left|August Fiedler (1843-1903) 100px|thumb|left|George Washington Maher (1864-1926) 200px|thumb|right|The Liederkranz Hall in Blue Island was designed by George Washington Maher and erected in 1896 at a cost of $8,000 to replace the club's building that had been destroyed by the Great Blue Island Fire of that year. It was dedicated on November 21, 1897 and was itself destroyed by fire on January 9, 1918.[[File:Weber House.JPG|200px|thumb|right|The William Weber house, 12956 Greenwood Avenue, Blue Island, Illinois. George Washington Maher, architect (1898). Weber was president of the First National Bank of Blue Island (now Great Lakes Bank of Choice) and of the local board of education. He also served as a member of the Cook County Board of Assessors from 1898 to 1925, and six times as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Weber had a connection to Maher's work on several levels - aside from his own home he was a member of the Blue Island Liederkranz, and through his activities with the Republican County Central Committee he had a close working relationship with Edgar J. Magerstadt, who in 1908 would use Maher to design the landmark home he built at 4930 S. Greenwood Ave. in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. Weber was doubtless well-acquainted with the Seyfarth family.]] Robert Seyfarth graduated from the Chicago Manual Training School in 1895, and the annual catalogue of the school for that year shows his position upon graduation to be that of a "Draughtsman" for the Chicago architect August Fiedler. Fiedler was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1871, establishing himself first in New York City and then in Chicago as a much sought-after designer of high-end residential interiors, later becoming an architect. He designed the woodwork and some of the other decoration for the Samuel Nickerson House (1879–1883) on Erie Street in Chicago (now the Driehaus Museum), and the interiors of the Hegeler Carus Mansion (William W. Boyington,1874–1876) in LaSalle, Illinois. In an 1881 letter to a colleague, one of Fiedler's contemporaries commented on the quality of Fiedler's design work for Nickerson by saying that "...it would be hard to comprehend it's beauty without seeing it". From 1893 to 1896 he was the chief architect for the Board of Education for the city of Chicago (being the first to assume the position upon the creation of the building department on January 18, 1893), for whom he designed and/or supervised the construction of fifty-eight school buildings, and he was responsible for the design of thirty-eight buildings (thirty-six in the German Village alone ) at the World's Columbian Exposition . Seyfarth began his career as an architect at the age of 17 working for Fiedler during the time the latter was architect to the board of education, and records show his position at the time he was hired to be "messenger" (although, as noted above, his graduation notice suggested something more than that), for which he was compensated with a salary of $6.00 per week (about $152. in 2010). Fiedler operated out of offices in Adler and Sullivan's Schiller (later Garrick Theater) Building (1891, demolished 1961), and Seyfarth was almost certainly introduced to him through his uncle Henry Biroth, who owned a pharmacy in Chicago and acted as the local secretary to the Illinois Pharmaceutical Association, who occupied offices down the hall from Fiedler. How long the young Seyfarth worked for Fiedler is not known, but by 1900 he was working for George Washington Maher on the renovation of the interior of the Nickerson mansion for Lucius Fisher. Here, according to the Historic American Buildings Survey, he designed and carved the woodwork for the rare book room. Maher was an influential architect associated with the Prairie School movement. According to H. Allen Brooks, professor emeritus of fine arts at the University of Toronto "His influence on the Midwest was profound and prolonged and, in its time, was certainly as great as was [Frank Lloyd] Wright's. Compared with the conventional architecture of the day, his work showed considerable freedom and originality, and his interiors were notable for their open and flowing...space". Henry M. Hyde, in a 1913 article in the ''Chicago Tribune'', recognized the work of Maher and of the other members of "the new American School of Architecture" by noting "They pay no attention to the conventions and rules of the classic types of architecture. They would express a new and democratic spirit." He went on to say "...there is no doubt that just now the Chicago insurgents and their work is attracting more attention and causing more comment than any other architectural development in America". The beginning of Maher's life, however, wasn't quite so auspicious. He was born in Mill Creek, West Virginia, and at about the age of five, due to the adverse economic conditions in Mill Creek at the time, his family moved to New Albany, Indiana. There Maher attended primary school, but by the time he was in his early teens the family was on the move again, this time to Chicago. They went there to take advantage of the prosperity that had come to the city after the Great Fire of 1871, and in 1878 George was sent to apprentice with the Chicago architect Augustus Bauer (after 1881 the partnership of Augustus Bauer and Henry Hill) by his parents who, as was not unusual at the time, needed to augment the family income with the earnings that this type of employment would provide. . As history would show, this turn of events proved to be fortunate for Maher. Bauer had come to the United States in 1853 having been a part of the wave of German immigration that had brought Robert Seyfarth's grandfather to the United States, and he and his various partners, who also were of German extraction, played an important role in providing architectural services for the large German community in Chicago during the second half of the 19th century. In 1869 Bauer designed the first German school in Chicago at 1352 S. Union Street for Zion Lutheran Church, and in 1872-73 Bauer and Löebnitz designed Concert Hall, Chicago Turngemeinde (demolished) at Clark Street and Chicago Avenue. The output of the Bauer partnerships included many distinguished projects, including Old St. Patrick's Church at 700 W. Adams Street (1856, renovated and restored 1992-1999, which ''Chicago'' magazine ranked among the 40 most important buildings in Chicago ), the Rosenberg Fountain in Grant Park (dedicated October 16, 1893, restored 2004), and Tree Studios at 601-623 N. State Street (1894–1913, with Parfitt Brothers, renovated 2004). Bauer is credited with the invention of the isolated footing foundation system, which allows for a longer span between vertical supports. This innovation among other things permits the broad expanses of glass that have become a standard feature of modern architecture. Maher was not Bauer's only notable protégé - at the beginning of the Civil War and again at the end of it, Bauer employed Dankmar Adler (1844–1900), who would later work with Louis Sullivan on buildings that would come to be regarded as important contributions to the Chicago School of architecture, notably the Chicago Stock Exchange Building (1893, demolished 1972) and the Auditorium Building (1889) (now the home of Roosevelt University). How long Maher worked for Bauer and his partners is not known, but by the 1880s he was working in the office of Joseph Lyman Silsbee, who before he became an architect had been professor of architecture at the new College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University. Silsbee was a talented architect who designed in the latest architectural fashion. He was noted for his Shingle Style buildings and “…was a master of the [Queen Anne] style, and in gaining the romantic effect admired by his clients he depended less upon [its inherent] chaos than his contemporaries”. He came to Chicago in 1882 to act as an interior architect and as such was responsible for the opulent interiors of Potter and Bertha Palmer's fantastic castle at 1350 N. Lake Shore Drive (built 1881-1885, demolished 1950, Henry Ives Cobb (1859–1931) and Charles Sumner Frost (1856–1931) architects), and stayed to design several important projects for the city, including the Lincoln Park Conservatory (1890–1895) and the West Virginia Building and the Moving Sidewalk for the World's Columbian Exposition (1893). While he worked for Silsbee, Maher worked alongside George Grant Elmslie (1869–1952), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) and Irving Gill (1870–1936), who would each later become prominent architects, although with decidedly different architectural styles. In 1888 Maher established his own office with Charles Corwin, a relationship that lasted until about 1893. He briefly enjoyed a professional relationship with Northwestern University in Evanstion, Illinois, where in 1909 (during Seyfarth's tenure in his office) he designed Swift Hall and the first Patten Gymnasium (demolished 1940). These buildings were bold expressions of his unique design philosophy and were to have been integral parts of his master plan for the campus, which the board of trustees had commissioned through a competition in 1911 but failed to execute. This prompted one commentator in later years to lament "It's probably the most regrettable loss in Northwestern architectural history: the unique Prairie School campus that never was". Frank Lloyd Wright would have predicted the outcome. What follows is point 13 in his list of advice given "To the young man in architecture": "Enter no Architectural competition under any circumstances except as a novice. No competition ever gave to the world anything worth having in Architecture. The jury itself is a picked average. The first thing done by the jury is to go through all the designs and throw out the best and the worst ones so as an average, it can average upon an average. The net result of any competition is an average by the average of averages.". Toward the end of his life, when he was chairman of the Municipal Arts and Town Planning Committee of the Illinois Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Maher became the driving force behind the restoration of the former Palace of Fine Arts, then a crumbling ruin which was the only major building that remained from the World's Columbian Exposition. Maher didn't live to see what he had begun come to fruition, but in 1940 the Museum of Science and Industry opened in the newly restored building, a project which was funded largely with a $5 million gift from the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932), who was president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. It is likely that Robert Seyfarth was introduced to Maher through family connections. Because Edward Seyfarth was an important local businessman, he would almost certainly have been familiar with the established architect's work that was being built in Blue Island. While still working in Maher's office, Seyfarth started to design houses on his own, and his early works show the influences of Maher and other Prairie School architects.

Independent practice

In about 1909 he opened his own architectural practice. In the early years the office was located in the Corn Exchange Bank Building (1908, Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, demolished 1985) on LaSalle Street which was a short walk from the Chicago Stock Exchange Building. He later moved into the newly completed Tribune Tower (1925, John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood), where he had an office on the twenty-first floor until 1934 when the Depression forced the move of his business to his home in the North Shore community of Highland Park. His was a small office - he did the design, drafting and supervision work himself, and for many years was assisted by Miss Eldridge, who typed specifications and generally kept the office running. After the office was moved to his home, he took as his assistant Edward Humrich (1901–1991), who himself became a noted architect after he left Seyfarth's employ shortly before the advent of World War II. Humrich enjoyed a distinguished career designing and building houses in the Usonian style of Frank Lloyd Wright. He earned his architectural license in 1968. In a series of interviews with the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986, he summed up Seyfarth's appeal: "He had an excellent sense of proportion and scale. His houses were all true to the North Shore..., and they're outstanding. He had a knack, kind of a freshness to it, and it was good." A year or two after he went into independent practice, Robert Seyfarth built a gambrel roofed Shingle Style house on Sheridan Road in Highland Park, across the street from Frank Lloyd Wright's Ward Willets house (1901), and it marked a change in the direction of his design work - for the rest of his career his would design in an eclectic style combining Colonial Revival, Tudor and Continental Provincial elements with strong geometric forms. During his career Seyfarth would design 73 houses in Highland Park alone, where his output began before the time of his arrival as a resident and lasted until shortly before his death. Here he elected to ignore the notion that in later years was famously offered to young architects by the Sage of Taliesin "... go as far away as possible from home to build your first buildings. The physician can bury his mistakes—but the Architect can only advise his client to plant vines.".

While sometimes considered a "society architect" , Seyfarth also has a number of small houses to his credit, but the largest percentage of his work was done for what would be considered upper middle-class clients. Almost exclusively a residential architect with the majority of his work in the Chicago area, he also designed projects in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Alabama. By the end of his career, he had designed over two hundred houses. One of his more important works is the Samuel Holmes House designed in 1926 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A shingle style house overlooking Lake Michigan, its landscaping was designed by Jens Jensen. Robert Seyfarth continued to live and work in Highland Park until his death on March 1, 1950.

The Chicago History Museum Research Center has an archive consisting of drawings for 70 of Seyfarth's projects dating after 1932.

Marketing

[[File:Creo-Dipt Improved.JPG|200px|thumb|left|This advertisement features the house at 1236 Asbury Avenue in Winnetka, Illinois, which was designed c. 1920. That Seyfarth was not averse to appropriating the elements of one project to improve the design of another can be illustrated here using the Baroque doorhead and pilasters surrounding the front door of this house. It was used at least one other time - on the house at 2500 Lincoln Street (1925) in Evanston, IL., where the house this time was finished with red brick and Colonial revival in style.]] 200px|thumb|right| Although un-attributed in this ad for the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau, this is the Alexander Stewart in Highland Park, IL, which Seyfarth designed in 1913 (see gallery picture 9 below). 200px|thumb|left|The house of noted author and journalist Bert Leston Taylor in Glencoe, IL. In her memorial to Taylor (B.L.T.), Eleanor Jewett had this to say "...Among his proudest posessions was his home in Glencoe, Ill, a house of comfortable proportions...this type of house is one of the most attractive that the North Shore boasts. It is, on the surface, a homey home". The photograph above is from her c. March, 1921 article, and first appeared in ''The Home You Longed For''. It was also used in an ad for the Creo-Dipt Company.200px|thumb|right|Advertisement for the Schick-Johnson Company that appeared in the December, 1910 edition of ''Architectural Record'' magazine. The company created the paneling for the Florentine Room, which Seyfarth designed for the north tower of the Congress Hotel in downtown Chicago. The building was designed by Clinton Warren and opened in 1893 as an annex to Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Hotel (1889) to accommodate guests from the World's Columbian Exposition. In 1912 the Florentine Room was the site of discussions between Theodore Roosevelt and his opponents that resulted in the creation of Roosevelt's [[Progressive Party (United States, 1912)|Bull Moose Party. ]] During his career, Seyfarth's work appeared in magazines and journals and in the advertisements of various architectural supply firms. The extent to which this was done is not known, but articles by Eleanor Jewett (1892–1968), art critic for the ''Chicago Tribune'' ("Cape Cod Architecture seen in B.L.T.'s Home" (c. March, 1921) discussing the Taylor house at 92 Dell Place in Glencoe, Illinois) and Herbert Croly of the ''Architectural Record'' ("The Local Feeling in Western Country Houses", October, 1914, which discusses the Kozminski and McBride houses in Highland Park at 521 Sheridan Road and 2130 Linden, respectively) survive to give us some idea of how Seyfarth's work was received during the time he was practicing. (Croly would later go on to become the founding editor of ''The New Republic'' magazine.) Additionally, photographs of houses he designed appeared in ''The Western Architect'' magazine a number of times in the 1920s. Also surviving are copies of advertisements from the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau (see image, right), the California Redwood Association (again with the McBride House), the Pacific Lumber Company (featuring the Churchill house in Highland Park at 1375 Sheridan Road), The Creo-Dipt Company (see image, left), the White Pine Bureau, the American Face Brick Association and the Stewart Iron Works Company of Cincinnati (with a picture of the H. C. Dickinson house at 7150 S. Yale in Chicago). In 1908, his Prairie-style house for Dickinson was published in ''House Beautiful'' magazine. In 1918, the Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau released a 32 page portfolio featuring houses built from Seyfarth's designs. Included were photographs, floor plans, bills of material, an estimate of the costs, and a brief description of important features. Entitled ''The Home You Longed For'', the booklet was announced in ''Building Age Magazine'' under the heading "New Catalogs of Interest to the Trade". Although generally unavailable today, it must have enjoyed a wide circulation in its time. It was acquired the following year for the collection of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and referred to that same year in an illustrated article that appeared in ''Printers' Ink Monthly'' entitled "The Loose-Leaf Portfolio - an Aid to Reader Interest", where it was described as "...a very attractive loose-leaf portfolio" and as a successful example of its type of publication. In participating in this activity, Seyfarth was following the example of George Washington Maher, who was widely published during his career. Articles by Maher and about him appeared regularly in publications that included ''Western Architect'', ''Inland Architect'', ''Architectural Record'' and ''Arts and Decoration''.

Selected projects

Notes on the pictures

1.) The first Robert Seyfarth house. This simple Prairie School house was built while Seyfarth was still working for George Washington Maher. The older architect's influence is clearly evident here, down to the use of a Maher hallmark, the lion's head, which appear here as brackets to "support" the second floor sleeping porch balcony. Seyfarth had used this feature shortly before in his design for the cabinetry and fireplace for the Samuel Nickerson house (now The Richard H. Driehaus Museum) at 25 East Erie Street in Chicago, which Maher renovated for Lucius Fisher in 1900-1901. A 1904 photograph in the collection of the library at Lake Forest College shows this house with the apertures of the sleeping porch only screened in the manner of the front porch of his second house in Highland Park, suggesting that Seyfarth also intended this building's now-enclosed counterpart on the Ellis house in Beverly to be open to the weather, as was the sleeping porch on the Dickenson house in Englewood, Chicago (see item #2 below). The photo also shows Seyfarth's use of a striated pattern in the shingles on the roof that Maher would use in 1907 on the Henry Schultz house in Winnetka, IL and the Kenilworth Club (in Kenilworth, IL), and on occasional other projects over the years. The house could be a study for the Ernest J. Magerstadt house which Maher built at 4930 S. Greenwood Avenue in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago in c.1908. It appeared in the background of establishing shots in the 2011 New Line Cinema film ''The Rite'', which starred Anthony Hopkins and Colin O'Donoghue. 2.) H.C. Dickinson house. This is the first Robert Seyfarth house, writ large, in brick and stone. Although the sleeping porch on the second floor has been enclosed in a manner not in keeping with the style of the house, this house is otherwise also very similar in composition to the John Ellis house in Beverly Hills, Chicago (1908), which shows that Seyfarth, like many of his profession, felt free to copy himself to develop, refine or expand upon an idea further for another client when necessary. Note that the house retains the wrought iron fence that appeared with it in the 1909 ad for the Stewart Iron Works Co. (see left). 3.) Kenneth Bullard house. The house is shown here as it appeared in the November 1912 edition of ''The Canadian Builder and Carpenter'' magazine. The picture and accompanying text were included under the heading “Two Prize Concrete Block Buildings – Editorial Correspondence” as a result of the house’s having won a competition sponsored by the Ideal Concrete Block Machinery Company of London, Ontario and South Bend, Indiana. The house was described as “An Artistic Bungalow constructed of stucco and concrete block”, and a brief description was given that included its dimensions, number of rooms and structural details. It was noted that the house was completed for $6,500. Today it is remodeled beyond recognition.

4.) H.S. Crane house. Maher's influence is clearly still evident in the design of this early house.

5.) Maurice Kozminski house. Maurice W. Kozminski was a mortgage banker with the Chicago firm Kozminski and Yondorf, and was the General Western Agent for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique from the age of 23 until 1916 when he was called to New York to assume the position of Director General of Passenger Traffic for the line. Pictures of the house appeared in ''Architecture'' magazine in 1911 and in ''The Architectural Record'' in October 1914. Here it was described as follows:

"...These [Midwest country] houses almost uniformly give the impression of being built for people of refinement who take a keen interest in making their homes attractive, and who have to that end sought the advice of competent architects. One of the most attractive of these houses is that of Mr. W. [sic] Kozminski, at Highland Park, Ill. Its architect, Mr. Robert Seyfarth, has charmingly adapted the proportions and lines of an Italian villa to a contemporary American suburban residence; a formal treatment model has been converted into a comparatively informal modern residence, with a large enclosed porch and with none of the landscape gardening which is ordinarily needed to bind the house to the site.".

The image above shows the house as it appeared in the article for ''The Architectural Record''. It has subsequently been demolished. 6.) The second Robert Seyfarth house. The picture to the left shows the house as it appeared in 1911, before any additions were made to it by Seyfarth or subsequent owners. The picture above shows the house as it appeared in 1981 with changes made by Seyfarth - in 1920 he added the garage and the hyphen in between, and in about 1922 he enclosed the front porch, which runs across the front of the house and is screened in the 1911 photo. With the gambrel roof, wood shingle siding and other elements of traditional design, the house makes a distinct break with the stylistic influence of Maher. Today it has later additions that have been sympathetically designed to respect Seyfarth's original intention. 7.) Daniel and Maude Eisendrath house. Daniel Eisendrath was a prominent Chicago surgeon and a professor of surgery at the University of Illinois. He was also a noted writer and the author of two textbooks on clinical anatomy and surgical diagnosis. The house was built in 1904 according to plans created by the architect Henry Leopold Ottenheimer (1868–1919), who early in his career had worked at the office of the celebrated Chicago architectural firm of Adler and Sullivan along with Frank LLoyd Wright. (Ottenheimer's time there may best be remembered by some as having been the person who stabbed Wright in the back with a drafting knife during a scuffle.). After time spent furthering his studies in Paris, Ottenheimer returned to Chicago and established his own practice, which operated under the name of Ottenheimer, Stern & Reichert. It was during that time that he persuaded the young Rudolph Schindler to come from Vienna to work in his office. Seyfarth was called upon by the Eisendraths to submit drawings to renovate the house in 1910, and the building permit for the work was taken out on April 30 of that year.

8.) Samuel E. Thomason house. The composition and the stucco finish, casement windows, and tile roof shows that Seyfarth owes a debt of inspiration to Howard Van Doren Shaw for this Arts and Crafts design.

9.) Alexander Stewart house. This house is seen by some as being among the architect's finest. With the imaginative use of traditional materials and non-traditional geometry, Seyfarth made the Colonial Revival his own. The house features a modern convenience that was a common feature in Seyfarth's frame houses in this style - the wooden shutters are functional and operate with a crank from the inside of the house.

10.) 2064 W. Pratt Blvd. Note the symmetrical pavilions attached to the east and west ends of the house, a device used by Seyfarth a year earlier at the Alexander Stewart house in Highland Park (see gallery picture 9).

11.) Lawrence Howe house. Here Seyfarth gives a nod to the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, and particularly to their forward-thinking early work, namely the Preston Hall Butler house in St. James, New York (by Stanford White, 1878, enlarged c. 1881) and the William Low house in Bristol, Rhode Island (1887, demolished 1962). McKim, Mead & White would soon "abandon simplicity and its hidden potential", but Seyfarth would pay homage to it here and for the rest of his career. The house is shown here as it appeared in February, 1920 issue of ''The Western Architect'' magazine.

12.) 700 Greenwood Ave. Although not particularly large, this house presents an impressive façade to the street by virtue of its correct proportion, commanding front entrance, slate roof and lack of clutter brought on by extraneous detail that would tend to make the house seem smaller by breaking up its clean geometry. With the use of inverted dormers, Seyfarth is free to locate windows on the second floor without having to give consideration to the protuberances that would result with conventional dormers.

16.) The Krueger Funeral Home. In 1913 Seyfarth had designed a house two blocks farther north on Greenwood Avenue for Robert Krueger, whose family had founded the funeral home in 1858. The funeral home was designed to look like a house to blend in with the residential architecture that surrounded it in Blue Island's "silk stocking" district. The Krueger and Seyfarth families were related by marriage. (The building was used inside and out in the 2006 Paramount Pictures film Flags of our Fathers.)

17.) Wagstaff house. In this house Seyfarth shows his affinity for the work of his near-contemporary Howard van Doren Shaw (1869–1926). In its geometry and with Seyfarth's usual simplification of exterior decoration, the house shares a similarity to the Hugh J. McBirney house (1908, 81 W. Laurel, Lake Forest, IL), which "...has more in common with the forms of the hipped roof houses of Wright and the Prairie School". The Wagstaff house also shares the enclosed porches that are an important feature of the McBirney house, and like it "...the house is almost devoid of specific stylistic elements". 19.) John Cameron Aspley house. Aspley (1888–1969) was the editor of ''Sales Management Magazine'' and founder and president of its parent company, Dartnell Corporation of Chicago. In that capacity he was the author of a dozen books on the subject (some of which are still in print). The J.C. Aspley Award and Scholarship, for achievement and excellence in marketing, is named in his honor. He was also active in causes that promoted the public good - for example he served on the Advisory Committee for the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois, and was the chairman of the Wilson Avenue YMCA in Chicago.

Aspley must have been a satisfied client. Seyfarth had designed a house for him at 230 Fairview Road in Glencoe in 1919 that appeared in ''The Western Architect'' the following year (see image, left), and an addition to the Dartnell Corporation building at R avenswood and Leland Avenues in Chicago in 1932. This house is one of Seyfarth's largest, and sits on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. The layout is such that most of the rooms face the lake. The house features the inverted dormer windows that are a hallmark of Seyfarth's work, and lannon-stone walls that are likely the work of Caesar Fiocchi, who was one of a small group of craftsmen that Seyfarth relied upon to interpret his work as he intended. Fiocchi would also have been responsible for the carving over the front door. 20.) Arthur Seyfarth house. This house is another one that features operable exterior shutters. Note the original storm windows, which reproduce the pattern of the muntins on the movable double-hung sash. Note, too, how the inverted dormers here help to maintain the simple geometry of the building. To improve the proportions of this house's large living room, Seyfarth raised its ceiling higher than those of any of the other rooms on the first floor. He inserted built-in drawers into the exterior walls of the second floor bedrooms beneath the roof to utilize what would otherwise be wasted space and so that the need of case pieces for the storage of clothing was virtually eliminated. This convenience was one that had been promoted by Frank Lloyd Wright in an article in ''The Architectural Record'' magazine in 1908 "...The most truly satisfactory apartments are those in which most or all of the furniture is built in as part of the original scheme...".

21.) Roscoe Page house. Read ''Robert Seyfarth'' by David van Zanten, which originally appeared in the ''Chicago Architectural Club Journal'' in 1985, at RobertSeyfarthArchitect.com

24.) Russell E. Q. Johnson house Here Seyfarth embraced the ranch style floor plan with his own twist. The house is one of a number of the type that he designed beginning in 1936 (for Kittermaster at 1415 Waverly Road, Highland Park, demolished), the year before Frank Lloyd Wright drew up the plans for his first Usonian house for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, which is credited with inspiring the craze for single-level living that lasted for nearly fifty years.

Demolition and controversy

200px|thumb|right|The George Mahler house, Highland Park, IL. c. 1942 (demolished) 200px|thumb|right|The William Schreiber house, Blue Island, IL. 1950 Not all of Seyfarth's buildings have survived. One house at 67th and Yale was demolished in the late 1960s to make way for the construction of Kennedy-King College. The parking lot for the 6th District (Gresham) police station, built in 1997, occupies the spot where Dr. F.S, Tufts had built a store and offices (at 7754 S. Halsted St.) in 1909. At least one demolished house continues to live on, in a manner of speaking. Although it was a designated local landmark, the George Mahler house at 90 Ridge Road in Highland Park (1942) was demolished and replaced with a larger home, but it's virtual twin still stands at 12857 S. Maple Avenue in Blue Island, having been built for William Schrieber in 1950, the year of Robert Seyfarth's passing. Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic for ''The New York Times'', made this classic observation about the phenomenon in a 1968 article she wrote about the demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel (1923–1968) in Tokyo: "There is no art as impermenant as architecture. All that solid brick and stone mean nothing. Concrete is as evanescent as air. The monuments of our civilization stand, usually, on negotiable real estate; their value goes down as land value goes up...The logic and mathematics are immutable." Most demolitions of Seyfarth's buildings fall into this category - they're torn down with little fanfare to be replaced by larger homes. There is one notable exception. The Hubbard/Brach house, which stood at 595 Sheridan Road in Winnetka, IL, was demolished in 2001 by a developer over the strong objections of local historians and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. The property had a hat trick in the arsenal for its defense that should have prevented it from being razed, but Winnetka had a weak landmark ordinance that required the owner's consent before a proposed landmark could be designated. The house sat on a three acre lot overlooking Lake Michigan. It was built c.1854, and in 1871 had become the home of Gilbert Hubbard, a founding father of the town and the developer of a large section of it that today is called Hubbard's Woods. The house was sold in 1924 to Edwin Brach (an heir to the Brach's candy fortune), who with his family owned the house until 1999, when it was sold to George Garrick, who had become wealthy as an internet venture capitalist. At the time the Brach family bought it, the house underwent a significant renovation that was designed by Seyfarth, at which time it was extensively remodeled and increased in size to 11 rooms. All of this notwithstanding, Garrick felt the house had no architectural or historic value and his only apparent interest in the property was in the land on which it was located. Shortly after coming into possession of it he requested a demolition permit for the house so that the property could be sub-divided for two new houses. Without a strong preservation ordinance, the village was powerless to stop the demolition, and after fruitless attempts were made to come to some other accommodation the permit was granted and the house was demolished. In the end, Garrick never developed the parcel. The basement of the old house was filled in and the lot was allowed to return to its natural state. He later sold the property for a $500,000 loss and returned to California.

Salient features

200px|thumb|left| Detail, front doorway of the Alexander and Sarah Colvin House, 5940 N. Sheridan Road, Edgewater, Chicago, IL. George Washington Maher, architect. 1909 200px|thumb|right|The diagram above illustrates the difference between the amount of sunlight that penetrates into an interior space when an inverted dormer (top) is used compared to the use of a traditional dormer. Although considered a revivalist architect, Seyfarth's designs were not pedantic copies of existing work or even typical examples of the revival architecture that was popular at the time. Despite the fact that his design aesthetic was more traditional than that of his previous employer, Seyfarth had absorbed many of Maher's (and the Prairie School's) ideas and incorporated them into his own architectural philosophy. His buildings provided their owners with architecture that offered the most up-to-date conveniences and floorplans that were considered modern - but that was carefully imbued with the warmth and character of earlier times. From his introduction to ''The Home You Longed For'' - "These few old world standards, rightly employed, have become completely molded to fit our present conditions...With such a rich inheritance handed down to us, why should not all our homes be...examples of these splendid former types which were fashioned on sound principles beyond reason for change of design and possessing an artistic grace from which future generations may gather lasting inspiration - made to live in and adorned to please - such should be the enduring qualities of the typical American home of today." His adaptation of "old world standards" to suit modern taste was done in several ways. First of all, Seyfarth flooded his interiors with natural light. What made this possible in the principal rooms of the first floor were the floor-length windows, which here and elsewhere were frequently wider than what might be acceptable to Palladio, but that were always in proportion to the building of which they were an element. On the upper floors where inverted dormers were used, sunlight is allowed to come directly into the room since the tunnel to the outdoors that is created by the ceiling of a convention dormer and half the area of the cheek walls is virtually eliminated (see image above - the angle of the sunlight as shown here is represented as it would be at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes in Chicago). Elsewhere, bays and banks of windows were frequently included to offer the same benefit. Another device that was sometimes used quite dramatically by Maher (see image, upper left) that is a signature feature of Seyfarth's work is the embellishment of the front door as the main decorative feature of the house, usually to the exclusion of everything else on the building. This allowed for the buildings' geometry and finish materials to speak for its architectural style, and act as a counterpoint to what was seen, especially then, as the fussiness of the architecture of the previous three quarters of a century. Here he was practicing what Louis Sullivan had preached:

"...I take it as self-evident that a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion. It is not evident to me that ornament can intrinsically heighten these elemental qualities. Why, then, should we use ornament? Is not a noble and simple dignity sufficient?...I should say that it would be greatly for our esthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years, in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well-formed and comely in the nude...This step taken, we might safely inquire to what extent a decorative application of ornament would enhance the beauty of structures - what new charm it would give them...We shall have learned,...that ornament is mentally a luxury, not a necessary, for we shall have discerned the limitations as well as the great value of unadorned masses."

Having worked in the frequently austere style of Maher for a "period of years", Seyfarth was ready to work with traditionally inspired ornament, judiciously applied. And as stylistically different as Seyfarth's work is from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Seyfarth embraced Wright's feeling that

"...We no longer have an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are ''of'' each other."

Seyfarth frequently designed outdoor living space that was under the protective roof of the house but exposed its occupants to the benefits of fresh air and sunlight (see gallery images 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 23, although some have been subsequently enclosed.) And the centrally located fireplaces that Wright espoused, along with their prominent chimneys, were to become a major feature of Seyfarth's work. One feature of the current age, the ubiquitous attached garage (the successful inclusion of which apparently continues to confound architects today), was frequently incorporated into the design of the main house with such skill one observer noted that "...Norman peasants must have been driving automobiles since the Conquest."

Significant works

Design for built-in cabinets and fireplace for the gallery of the Samuel Nickerson house, Chicago, IL (Burling & Whitehouse, 1883), for Lucius Fisher,1900-1901

The original Patten Gymnasium, Northwestern University, 1909 - demolished 1940, Evanston, IL

(The first two as an assistant to George Maher) The Florentine Room at the Congress Plaza Hotel, 1909, Chicago, IL (see image above). Recital Hall and showrooms for the Baldwin Piano Co., 264 (later 323 S.) Wabash Ave., 1910, Chicago, IL - demolished First Methodist Church, 1918, Geneseo, IL Clubhouse, South Side Country Club (now South Bluff Country Club), 1919, Peru, IL

West Ridge School addition, 1926, Highland Park, IL

Samuel Holmes House, 1926, Highland Park, IL, with Jens Jensen, landscape architect.

Krueger Funeral Home, 1927, Blue Island, IL

References

;Notes

;Further reading

"The Home You Longed For: Designs by Robert Seyfarth Architect" (1918). Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau.

Cohen, Stuart E. (2000). "Robert E. Seyfarth, Architect". Chicago Architectural Club Journal 9: p108–115.

External links

Blue Island Illinois Landmarks

John Ellis House

Winnetka Historical Society; 175 Chestnut

RobertSeyfarthArchitect.com

Architect Robert E. Seyfarth and family collection, ca. 1900-2000s | Lake Forest College Library Archives and Special Collections

The Art Institute of Chicago - The Chicago Architects Oral History Project - Results for Robert Seyfarth

"George Washington Maher"

Category:1878 births Category:1950 deaths Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:American architects

Coordinates

34°03′″N118°15′″N

{{infobox scientist |name

Steven Arthur Pinker |image Steven_Pinker_Göttingen_10102010c_crop.JPG |image_size |caption Steven Pinker (''Göttingen, 2010'') |birth_date September 18, 1954 |birth_place Montréal, Québec, Canada |residence United States of America |citizenship Canadian-American |ethnicity Jewish Canadian-American |field evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics |work_institution |alma_mater Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University |doctoral_advisor |doctoral_students |known_for How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate |prizes Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society) }}

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His academic pursuits include experiments on mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his less academic books, he argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include ''The Language Instinct'' (1994), ''How the Mind Works'' (1997), ''Words and Rules'' (2000), ''The Blank Slate'' (2002), and ''The Stuff of Thought'' (2007).

Biography

Career

Pinker was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada in 1954, and graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Pinker was named one of ''Time Magazine's'' 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004 and one of ''Prospect'' and ''Foreign Policy'''s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In 2010, he was named by ''Foreign Policy'' magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers' remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the ''New York Times''. Gladwell published a rebuttal in the ''Times'' regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal. The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life.

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows.

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

Personal

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of ''The Sexual Paradox''. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, ''I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.'' As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as ''neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian''. Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.

Theories of language and mind

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In ''The Language Instinct'' (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work

Pinker's books, ''The Language Instinct'', ''How the Mind Works'', ''Words and Rules'', ''The Blank Slate'', and ''The Stuff of Thought'' combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. ''The Language Instinct'' has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, ''The 'Language Instinct' Debate''. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's ''Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling)'', which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography

Books

''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984)

''Visual Cognition'' (1985)

''Connections and Symbols'' (1988)

''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989)

''Lexical and Conceptual Semantics'' (1992)

''The Language Instinct'' (1994)

''How the Mind Works'' (1997)

''Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language'' (1999)

''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' (2002)

''The Best American Science and Nature Writing'' (editor and introduction author, 2004)

''Hotheads'' (an extract from ''How the Mind Works'', 2005)

''The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature'' (2007)

''The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes'' (2011)

Articles and essays

Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), ''Language evolution: States of the Art'' New York: Oxford University Press.

S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" ''Chicago Sun-Times'', July 15, 2007

A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References

External links

C-SPAN BookTV In Depth video interview with Steven Pinker, 3 hrs.

Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation

Steven Pinker: The stuff of thought TED, July, 2005

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence TED, March, 2007

Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"

Steven Pinker discusses the evolutionary psychology of morality in "The Moral Instinct" ''The New York Times'', January 13, 2008

Steven Pinker on The Hour

Steven Pinker 2003 TEDTalk: Chalking it up to the blank slate

;Debates

The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose

The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke

Radio interview on ''Philosophy Talk''

;Vitae

Steven Pinker's Website

Time magazine page on Pinker

Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files

"Steven Pinker: the mind reader," ''The Guardian'' Profile, November 6, 1999

Live interview with Steven Pinker on ''The Blank Slate''

Online video interview with Pinker

"Basic Instincts" - ''The Guardian'' profile by Oliver Burkeman, September 22, 2007.

Advisory board biography for the Secular Coalition for America

;Reviews

Article on The Language Instinct by Theodore Dalrymple

Louis Menand's critique of The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, originally published in ''The New Yorker'' magazine

"Meet the Flintstones" by Simon Blackburn, a critique of The Blank Slate.

Biology vs. the Blank Slate ''Reason'' magazine interview with Pinker

Evolutionary Psychology of Religion

"The Blind Programmer", a review of ''How the Mind Works'' by Edward Oakes.

Steven Pinker to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2007

Category:1954 births Category:Living people Category:American atheists Category:American linguists Category:American psychologists Category:American science writers Category:Canadian atheists Category:Canadian skeptics Category:Canadian expatriate academics in the United States Category:Jewish Canadian writers Category:McGill University alumni Category:American people of Canadian-Jewish descent Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Evolutionary psychologists Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty Category:Jewish atheists Category:People from Montreal Category:Anglophone Quebec people Category:American humanists Category:Dawson College alumni Category:Canadian linguists Category:Canadian psychologists Category:Canadian science writers

bn:স্টিভেন পিংকার bg:Стивън Пинкър cs:Steven Pinker da:Steven Pinker de:Steven Pinker et:Steven Pinker es:Steven Pinker eo:Steven Pinker fa:استیون پینکر fr:Steven Pinker ko:스티븐 핑커 hr:Steven Pinker it:Steven Pinker he:סטיבן פינקר hu:Steven Pinker nl:Steven Pinker ja:スティーブン・ピンカー no:Steven Pinker nn:Steven Pinker pl:Steven Pinker pt:Steven Pinker ru:Пинкер, Стивен Артур sk:Steven Pinker sl:Steven Pinker fi:Steven Pinker sv:Steven Pinker tr:Steven Pinker zh:史迪芬·平克

Rebecca Saxe is a professor in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT. Her research is on the neural basis of social cognition, and in particular she is known for proposing the role of the right temporoparietal junction in thinking about people's mental states.

Saxe received her BA in psychology and philosophy from Oxford University in 2000, and her PhD in cognitive science from MIT in 2003. She currently holds the Fred and Carole Middleton Career Development Professorship at MIT.

External links

Saxe Lab

Her BCS faculty page

Search PBS.org for Rebecca Saxe

References

Further reading

Category:Living people Category:Cognitive scientists Category:Cognitive neuroscientists Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty

Denis Dutton (9 February 1944 – 28 December 2010) was an academic, web entrepreneur and libertarian media commentator/activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was also a co-founder and co-editor of the websites Arts & Letters Daily, ClimateDebateDaily.com and cybereditions.com.

Dutton was from Los Angeles, California, specifically the San Fernando Valley, where his parents owned a bookstore; he was educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He taught at several American universities, including the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan–Dearborn, before emigrating to New Zealand. From 2008 to 2010 he was the Head of the Philosophy school in an unofficial capacity at Canterbury and, when Professor Copeland, Head of the School, was quarantined because of influenza in 2009, Dutton acted briefly as Head of Humanities.

He was one of the founding members and first chair of New Zealand Skeptics.

Art appreciation theory

Dutton observed that authenticity in art may be used in the sense of ''nominal authenticity'', in the sense of a work of art being correctly attributed to its author rather than being a forgery, or ''expressive authenticity'', where a work is a true expression of an individual’s or a society’s values and beliefs. He discussed the ambiguity inherent in both definitions, asking whether crude "native carvings" made for tourists are authentic, and whether a performance of a Shakespeare play with female actresses or a performance of a Bach composition on a piano are inauthentic.

Dutton's 2009 book ''The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution'' opposes the commonly held modernist view that art appreciation is culturally learned, claiming instead that art appreciation stems from evolutionary adaptions made during the Pleistocene. He set out an abbreviated version of his theory in a 2009 Google Talk lecture.

Views on Progress

In reviewing Charles Murray's book Human Accomplishment, Dutton argued that despite the fact that "''wealth, cities and their cultural endowments, communication, and political freedom have...improved in recent centuries''", nevertheless world progress in the arts and sciences had declined, especially since around 1800.

Dutton wrote approvingly of the four cultural conditions that Murray claimed necessary for people to reach their full potential, these being:

# "''...the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.''" # that "''encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals''." # where organizing structures are rich and old, including "''theories, styles, and techniques...such as the spectroscope in physics or the grand piano in music''". # where people have "''a well-articulated vision of, and use of, the transcendental good relevant to that domain''." Such a good, according to Dutton, can include truth, morality, or beauty.

Criticism of academic prose

Dutton used his editorship of the journal ''Philosophy and Literature'' to criticise many literary and cultural theorists for a writing style that is, "no better than adequate -- or just plain awful." In 1995, his Bad Writing Contest criticised the prose of Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson. In 1998, the contest awarded first place to University of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a sentence which appeared in the journal ''diacritics'':

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton said, "To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it." Butler challenged the charges of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of the ''New York Times'' and the affair briefly became a ''cause célèbre'' in the world of academic theorists. Dutton then ended the contest.

Public radio advocacy

Dutton was a passionate supporter of public radio. In the early 1990s he founded the lobby group ''The New Zealand Friends of Public Broadcasting'' in response to proposals to devolve New Zealand's two non-commercial public radio stations.

In 1995 he was appointed to the board of directors of Radio New Zealand, where he served for seven years. After concluding his term as a director, Dr Dutton and Dr John Isles issued a report criticising Radio New Zealand for loss of neutrality in news and current affairs, failure to adhere to charter and opposed to contestable funding of broadcasting.

Late academic contributions

In 2010, Dutton introduced a course entitled “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (Phil220) The title was borrowed, with permission, from the title of a book by philosopher Daniel Dennett, the man who famously called Darwin's formulation of evolution "The single best idea anyone has ever had." One of the purposes of the course was to demonstrate why Dennett's claim is defensible.

The required anchor text for the course was ''The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution'', by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist. Writings by Charles Darwin were sourced from another recommended text, Darwin's ''On the Origin of Species'', edited by Joseph Carroll. Carroll's collection included important excerpts from ''The Voyage of the Beagle'' and ''The Descent of Man'', as well as historical background (including Darwin's own short autobiography) and source material on other evolutionary thinkers.

Dutton intended this course to be a thought-provoking journey through the making of ''The Origin of Species'', highlighting not only his personal journey but also the obstacles that thwarted early understanding of evolutionary theory.

Because of Dutton's death, this course will not be offered again. Douglas Campbell will staff one of Dutton's entry level courses, Philosophy 110"Science Good, Bad and Bogus," as mentioned above. Campbell founded with Dutton, and at present edits, ''Climate Debate Daily''; However, the remainder of Dutton's Courses are likely to be cancelled indefinitely

Death

In his final Email to his students in Philosophy 110, he wrote that the shoulder pain he had been suffering from was in fact cancer, and that he had recently begun a non-alternative treatment which left him feeling much better. He continued to decline, however, so that in his last lecture of 2010 he announced to his Philosophy 220 students his reluctant retirement from university teaching. Without ceremony, he thus slipped out the door of the university where he had lectured since 1984. Other students did not know of his retirement until they received a memo acknowledging the cancellation or restructuring of the courses he had been teaching. At its December 2010 graduation ceremony, the University of Canterbury awarded him a Research Medal for his work, barely a fortnight before his death from cancer on 28 December 2010.

Bibliography

Dutton's publications include:

References

External links

Denis Dutton's personal website

Arts & Letters Daily

Video (and audio) of interview/conversation with Dutton and John Horgan on Bloggingheads.tv

Current Biography cover story on Dutton

Dutton on TED.com -- ''A Darwinian theory of beauty''

An interview about Arts & Letters Daily on ''The Marketplace of Ideas''

An interview about ''The Art Instinct'' on ''The Marketplace of Ideas''

Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty, TED.com. Denis Dutton's provocative theory on beauty - art, music and other beautiful things. Landscape art discussed in the timeframe between 6:55 - 8:35.

Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:People from the San Fernando Valley Category:Philosophy academics Category:University of Canterbury faculty Category:New Zealand people of American descent Category:University of California, Santa Barbara alumni Category:New Zealand sceptics Category:University of Michigan–Dearborn Category:Writers from California Category:Cancer deaths in New Zealand Category:Deaths from prostate cancer Category:2010 deaths Category:1944 births Category:Philosophers of art

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