Abstract
The theme of Darwin’s influence on philosophy has been a recurrent one, notably in John Dewey’s lecture in the semi-centennial year and again in J. H. Randall, Jr.’s defense of Dewey in the centennial year of 1959.1 Randall was, in effect, defending Dewey against the charge of another centennial essayist, J. S. Fulton, who write:
An essay on the philosophy of evolution in the century since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species can be written in two sentences. By the end of the first fifty years, every-body in the educated world took evolution for granted, but the idea was still intellectually exciting and its philosophical exploitation was entering upon its period of full maturity. By the end of the next fifty years, evolution belongs to ‘common sense’ almost as thoroughly as the Copernican hypothesis and other early landmarks of the scientific revolution; but the idea is no longer exciting, and evolutionary philosophy is out of fashion.2
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References
J. H. Randall, Jr., ‘The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 435–462.
J. S. Fulton, ‘Philosophical Adventures of the Idea of Evolution, 1859–1959’, Rice Institute Pamphlets 46 (1959), 1.
C.F.A. Pantin, ‘The Origin of Species’, in The History of Science, London 1951, p. 129ff.
See e. g., T. Dobzhansky, The Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, New York 1970.
E. O. Wilson, The Insect Societies, Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
Lynn Margulis, The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, New Haven 1970.
See G. Krueger, Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik, Tubingen 1931.
See Victor Hugo, Poésie, Collection l’lntegrale, Paris 1972, Vol. 2, pp. 560–61; Vol. 3, p. 663.
L. Eisenberg, ‘The Human Nature of Human Nature’, Science 176 (1972), 123–28.
Herbert Fingarette, Self Deception, London 1969.
Richard Rorty, ‘Functionalism, Machines and Incorrigibility’, Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), 203–220.
George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton 1966.
G. L. Stebbins, The Basis of Progressive Evolution, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1969.
Lawrence B. Slobodkin, ‘The Strategy of Evolution’, Amer. Sci. 52 (1964), 342–357.
C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal, London 1960.
Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa, Glencoe, 111., 1955.
See for instance Sir Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge, Oxford 1973, p. 67.
Norman Campbell, What is Science?, New York 1952.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grene, M. (1974). Darwin and Philosophy. In: The Understanding of Nature. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_11
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