A Reflection on Robert M. Young

One thing about Bob and his work - his presentation in writing and in person, and his presence in general - is the dedication to a moral task that he advocated for himself and for all of us. All that we do, in science as well as in politics, should have a moral purpose. I would summarize it by saying that one should act honourably.

One of his fundamental questions was how an area of behaviour, thinking and attitude got roped off from a moral purpose and bounded as an object of interest, without regard to how it played into an oppressive or destructive system; how it then could be pursued as a good or a pleasure in its own right. Bob called it an ‘aesthetization’ of science and technology, as when the physicist, Edward Teller, thought Robert Oppenheimer's technical solution to detonating the H bomb was beautiful (, p.24).

As a general thesis, Bob held the view that humanism was lost into human nature, and human nature was lost into nature, where nature lay outside a humanistic urge to do good. That is a line that carries from his early work on phrenology to his latest on psychoanalysis. His first book, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the 19^th Century (1970), a book centred on the place of phrenology and brain localization research within a biological and philosophical context, begins the exploration of the slippage of human nature into nature as an alien environment. Over the years, he came adamantly to oppose this trend and aimed to reverse it.

But of course, there is no science without boundedness; research goals are necessarily embedded in an immediate research strategy and also in an ideological environment. From the inside, there are assessments of the impact on society, as well as judgments of consequences for the growth of knowledge. From the outside, the history, philosophy, sociology and politics of science aim to reveal the embeddedness of research in the organization of power, hidden as it is inside the ideological and social apparatuses within which scientific