Summary: Publisher Summary 1 This collection of essays about, and a couple letters by, Edwin Bissell Holt examines a unique contributor to early American psychology and offers a defense for a renewed interested in his ideas and the issues of psychology he engaged. The collection opens with a preface offering readers background in the philosophical and scientific upheavals that laid the ground for the new sort of investigations Holt would pursue. The two-fold question of introspection and the practico-scientific reality of mental phenomena permeate Holt's work and comes up in these essays. Two letters, to William James in 1905 and Edward Reed in 1979, bracket his life and the collection. Organized into three sections, the essays consider specific responses informed or made by Holt to the problem of illusion, Holt's legacy, and Holt's New Realism against representationalism. The editor, Eric Charles (psychology, Pensylvannia State U.) offers an introduction to Holt's biography and broad influences/interests. The contributors are academic and experimental psychologists from around the world. Annotation 漏2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)   Publisher Summary 2 This volume brings to the attention of contemporary readers a tradition of psychological thought that has received little attention over the last century. Psychology's history has been unimaginatively presented as a fight between behaviorists and mentalists. A third alternative, the New Realism, which cuts through that dichotomy, has been lost."The New Realism" was indeed once new. This volume provides a glimpse of how this school of thought attempted to redefine the notion of mental processes, including consciousness, in psychological theoriing. Holt's rejected the nativity of iconoclastic Watsonian behaviorists, and thus the New Realism was thoughtful in ways that behaviorist social engineering was not. The implications of these innovations in psychological theoriing are traced from the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary period. The contributors provide these intellectual links, along with efforts to look at the relatedness of the human organism and its world. At their beginning, these ideas are embedded in a reverence for William James's work, particularly his later Radical Empiricism. In contemporary psychology, this legacy has given us the framework of ecological psychology as we know it today, and provides the basis for several modern critiques of cognitive psychology.The present volume opens the door for future historical inquiries. This is an exemplary addition to the series on the History of Psychological Ideas.