mself: he was among the first to see that variation could be "accidental" without violating causal laws, and his insistence that consciousness is a phenomenon of physiological processes anticipates Dennett's thesis in considerable detail. Without Wright's pioneering work, the full "dangerousness" of Darwin's idea might not have been recognized for decades.Science versus Speculation as Philosophic MethodWright was fond of the old saying, "all men are born either Aristoteleans or Platonists," and it became a hallmark of his radical empiricism. Either our ideas and theories are founded upon tangible and verifiable facts, or we shoehorn the world into the artificial containers of predisposed ideas. Clearly, for Wright, the superiority of the former is demonstrated in the dramatic success of natural science since the seventeenth century, the poverty of the latter in the ceaseless futility of metaphysical disputation. He thus stands squarely with the tradition of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Hume decrying
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