Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy (review)

480 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 1997 epistemologist to provide an ontological model for how representations make known the world. This is a stimulating and entertaining book, not the least because so many of its points--both historical and philosophical--are debatable. It is also a good read. STEVEN NAOLER Universityof Wisconsin,Madison Suzanne Cunningham. Philosophyand the Darwinian Legacy. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1996. Pg. x + 293. Cloth, $45.oo. American philosophy's distinctive voice was first raised in a concerted effort to draw out the implications of evolution, and especially of Darwinism, for philosophy. That was, in fact, the explicit aim of James's and Dewey's pragmatism, which saw mind as a flexible evolutionary adaptation designed to deal with changing environments. Recently , this voice has been heard again. (See, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Complexityand theFunction ofMind in Nature.) For a long, long time, however, one could find very little of this legacy among professional philosophers, American or otherwise. The book under review helps explain why. There was always a considerable threat to philosophy in flirting with evolution, for if mind is an adaptation to a physical, biotic, and social environment, its reach for the noncontextually rational, universal, and transcendent must necessarily exceed its grasp. In consequence, both classical analytic philosophy and continental phenomenology fled from naturalism in all its forms, and were especially dismissive of evolutionary naturalism. In Cunningham's chapters on Moore, who fled from Spencer, and on Russell, who reacted against Bergson as well, it becomes clear just how thoroughly classical analytic philosophy was motivated by rejection of evolutionary naturalism. (The usual story concentrates on its reaction against idealism.) The tone of this rejection , moreover, is for the most part not one of reasoned refutation but of contemptuous dismissal. In 1928, for example, we hear Russell using the annoying rhetoric of self-evidence to trash Darwinian theories of the mind. "Everybody," he proclaims, "would agree with Wittgenstein that Darwin's theory of the origin of species.., has nothing more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis of natural science" (quoted, 53). Cunningham wants to do more, however, than merely bring this history into view. She wants to revive Darwinian approaches to mind in order to bring them to bear on what knowledge actually is. Her strategy is to begin from the fact that it is easier to believe that our perceptual and emotional capacities are products of, and oriented toward, evolutionary adaptation than that our cognitive ones are. To go on to show that at least some cognitive states necessarily depend on perceptual states and that in turn "perceptual meanings are the sorts of things that regularly (and perhaps always) incorporate emotions, values, desires, moods, and the like" (z 17) is to go a considerable distance toward bringing cognition itself within the adaptationist circle. Phenomenology, Cunningham argues, might have been a help here. For its descrip- BOOKS RECEIVED 481 tions of the intentional directedness of consciousness can show how deeply rooted in perceptual and emotional considerations anything that can count as knowledge actually must be. But Husserrs hostility to naturalism, like Moore's and Russell's, doomed such a project. (Cunningham might have said more than she does about MerleauPonty in this connection; Heidegger, for his part, has a rich phenomenology of perception , emotion, and cognition, but is as resolutely antinaturalistic as his mentor.) In general, Cunningham's inquiry into issues that are nowhere near being settled follows something like the following schema: (x) a phenomenological view of perception is preferable to an analytic view (where 'preferable' means 'truer to the phenomena'). (2) a naturalistic phenomenology is preferable to a nonnaturalistic phenomenology . (3) Darwinian naturalism is preferable to functionalist naturalism (sensu Putnam), and especially to computationalist versions of the latter. Cunningham concedes that cognition (unlike mere belief) requires objectivity. It is crucial to her program, then, to rebut the view that the indexical character of beliefs that spring from or facilitate an organism's relationship to its environment--that is, their ineliminable, idiosyncratic reference to the subject--undermines their objective orientation. She does so by arguing that the cognitions in question are objectively about the organism's own...