Three pieces reflecting on the life, work and legacy of the late Bob Young by his former students Roger Smith, Roger Cooter and Kurt Jacobsen Roger Smith The historian of the evolutionary and psychological sciences, psychotherapist, philosopher of science, academic and scourge of academics, publisher and TV producer of radical science, libertarian socialist and family man, Bob Young, died, aged 83, early on 5th July. In later years he had a number of medical complications; an added infection proved too much. A large man with a large, often dominating presence, exceptional vitality of intellect and personality made him a large influence in many people’s lives. He was combative in manner and often embraced controversial personal and institutional roles, giving life to the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Underlying the colourful surface, which he and those with him always made the focus of attention, there was a deep moral and philosophical commitment to the value of the individual person. He thought life came with certain

values. His search for ways to live these values, first in academic intellectual terms, then through a radical Marxian interpretation of science and then in psychotherapeutic practice and teaching, added layer to layer of complex understanding. He created an exceptionally rich, if at times difficult, life – for himself, and for those around him.             Bob was born into a Presbyterian family in Highland Park, a rich suburb of Dallas, in Texas, though his family was not rich. He retained a love of aspects of that culture – steaks, the novels of Larry McMurtry, popular music and the rhetoric of the preacher. He was a scholarship boy at Yale University before beginning training at the University of Rochester Medical School. He discovered the intellectual theme that was to run through all his life: the gap between the medical conception of the body and the mental world of purposes and values. With boundless intellectual energy and ambition,…