The place of Darwin’s theories in the intellectual long run

Abstract

In 1909, as part of the celebrations commemorating Charles Darwin's birth in 1809 and the publication of his Origin of Species in 1859, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey gave a lecture at Columbia University on 'the influence of Darwinism on philosophy'. As printed the following year, his text begins: “That the publication of the 'Origin of Species' marked an epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well known to the layman. That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is very easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the 'Origin of Species' introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.” / For Dewey, what Darwinian science replaced was a Greek philosophy of nature that, as he presented it, had dominated unchallenged from the days of Plato and Aristotle, namely the doctrine that fixed, purposive natures - specific forms ( eide ) - are what are fully real and truly knowable.