History of american thought
The Evolutionary Philosophy of Chauncey WrightIntroductionIn the recent bestseller, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett argues that the truly "dangerous" aspect of the Darwinian revolution was not the notion that species evolve: Lamarck, Owen, and Darwin's grandfather Erasmus had already advanced popular versions of this thesis. Instead, the real incendiary was the mechanism of evolution - natural selection - by which descent with modification is due neither to latent potentialities within a species nor to the efforts of individual members, but to random variations that preserve "lucky" individuals and their offspring when the remainder are forced to extinction.1 If true, and applicable to humanity, natural selection obviates both the guiding hand of Providence and the alleged "ascent" of mankind.If Darwin's idea remains dangerous after nearly a century and a half, we can well imagine the intensity of the slugfest in the years immediately following the publication of the Origin of Species. John Stuart Mill lamented that "we may still count in England twenty a priori or spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience," but in his homeland Darwin could at least count on genuine academic freedom and
He centers upon "invariable experiences" thrust upon the mind by the "inconceivability of their negation. This would eliminate the need for science, of course, since everything about the world could be known just by looking, without the painstaking labor of hypothesis and experimentation. For in allowing that potentialities are unlocked by the force of changing environmental pressures, a favorable variation can be recognized as such only after the fact of surviving them. And Wright once demolished his protege for an early draft of the "will to believe" which declared a duty to affirm God in the absence of evidence; a chastened James changed duty to right. 6Wright, in fact, had anticipated this invitation a year earlier in "The Limits of Natural Selection," where he took on the redoubtable Alfred Russel Wallace. His radical views precluded regular academic employment, and for years he was forced to scrape out a living as a computer for the Nautical Almanac. Where empirical evidence is absent, the scientist may not venture, no matter how intriguing the a priori proof that might be concocted. It does not feign immediate and simultaneous knowledge of subjective sensation and objective in-itself reality. (231)Nor does realism truly embrace empiricism unless it takes into account the fact of evolution by natural selection. Finally, because natural selection predicts preservation of only those traits that promote survival, it cannot explain so-called "incipient" qualities or undeveloped structures that have no obvious utility. " This also holds for the limiting case of human will or volition. This conclusion helps explain Wright's assessment of the century's leading speculative evolutionist, Herbert Spencer. Hume once offered, against the purported evidence of the hand of a Master Architect, that the various calamities and inefficiencies of nature more aptly reflect the work of a junior apprentice. Chauncey Wright's LegacyWright lacked the cogency of Edwards, the magnificence of Emerson, the captivating rhetoric of Thoreau; nonetheless, he is arguably the most important American philosopher prior to Peirce. an impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
Common topics in this essay:
Conscious-ness Avoiding,
Darwin's Wallace,
Hamilton McCosh,
According Mivart,
Psychology Wright,
Natural SelectionDennett's,
Herbert Spencer,
Origin Species,
Cosmic Architect,
Indeed Mivart,
natural selection,
evolution natural selection,
scottish realism,
representational image,
innate potentialities,
evolution natural,
radical empiricism,
origin species,
changing environmental,
causes effects,
incipient qualities,
darwin's dangerous idea,
dewey's primary experience,
german idealism scottish,
mechanism evolution natural,
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Acceptance Essays
