Edwin Bissell Holt, an American psychologist and philosopher, was noted for his innovations in philosophical psychology. His influence was greater in psychology than in philosophy. In his time he was the American psychologist best known and most respected by the British. Holt completed his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard and taught there from 1901 to 1918, first as an instructor and then as assistant professor of psychology. In 1926 he returned from retirement to become visiting professor of social psychology at Princeton, but he retired permanently in 1936.

New Realism

Holt was one of the original six American New Realists who banded together in the first decade of the twentieth century in a polemic against idealism and representational realism. Holt was the only one, however, to attempt a systematic development of New Realism, first in a neutral monism, then, after giving that up, in a...