Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Biography: The Basic Discipline for a Human Science' 66k
I was asked to give a talk at the founding conference of a new journal, History of the Human Sciences at Durham University in September 1986. I took the opportunity to press the claims for the discipline of biography as the basic humanistic discipline as far as I could. I look at some relevant philosophical issues and extol some biographers - E.V. Wolfenstein on Malcolm X and (equivocally) Phyllis Grosskurth on Melanie Klein - and celebrate some of my own favourite from pleasure reading. I also sketch some of the things a course centring on biography would emphasize. This is a companion to my 'Charles Darwin and the Genre of Biography' and 'Desmond and Moore's Darwin: A Critique'. The essay was published in Free Associations No. 11: 108-30, 1988.