Evolution's First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity of Nature

1. Evolution and Philosophy

Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions , new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the Origin of Species. —John Dewey (M4:14) 찞 John Dewey was the first philosopher to recognize that Darwin’s thesis about natural selection not only required us to change how we think about ourselves and the life forms around us but also required a markedly different approach to philosophy. While other philosophers may have given some attention to evolutionary theory, it was Dewey alone who saw that if the mind emerged from earlier mindless forms, then this fact portended a new account of knowledge, ethics, and democracy. INTRODUCTION The discontinuous mind is ubiquitous. —Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (2004:21) WHILE THERE IS CURRENTLY considerable interest in the relationship between evolution and philosophy, the contributions of John Dewey to the advancement of philosophy continue to go unnoticed and, a fortiori, unappreciated. Darwin’s 1 ONE Evolution and Philosophy explanations give Dewey both the impetus and the cognitive locus standi to reconsider the content and methods of traditional philosophy. Dewey argues that Darwin’s thesis shows us that the pre-Darwinian search for an adequate account of epistemology and ethics without regard for, or in the explicit rejection of, science is no longer acceptable philosophic practice. Dewey’s writings present the development and use of naturalized analytical methods to reconstruct the problems and proposed solutions of traditional philosophy. When the Darwinian basis of Dewey’s thought is revealed and contrasted with recent work in cognitive science, one can see that Dewey’s arguments are quite relevant to the philosophic thought of the 21st century, especially the pursuit of a naturalistic theory of meaning. Several writers concerned with evolution or philosophic naturalism mention Dewey and other pragmatists, but they do not develop their arguments , which are significant for understanding the philosophic consequences of Darwinism. For example, Suzanne Cunningham gives a penetrating analysis of how several philosophers thought about Darwin’s thesis, but she mentions Dewey only briefly in the introduction to her book, Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy (1996:5). Kitcher, in his helpful booklength analysis of naturalism, “The Naturalists Return,” Philosophical Review (1992), except for a footnote, passes over anything Dewey has to say about naturalism. For the philosophic naturalists to attempt a return, without bringing Dewey’s initiating ideas about the evolutionary origins of that naturalism with them, is to fail to appreciate the significance of Dewey’s analyses. As will be shown in later chapters, the most important aspects of Dewey’s arguments are going unnoticed (with the important exception of Daniel Dennett), because Dewey is not being seen as first and foremost a Darwinist. Dennett has recently argued that any adequate account of human capacities must include evolutionary explanations of how humans came to possess these capacities (2003b). It may be possible to give historical accounts of how humans developed, but unless these accounts are based upon sound evolutionary explanations, they are inadequate. Furthermore, attempts to understand or evaluate any philosophic account proffered as a naturalized theory of ethics must attend to more than simply the appeal to scientific conclusions claimed to be relevant to these moral theses, because there are certain issues concerning the origins of humanity and human intelligence that must be adequately formulated to develop an acceptable account of naturalized mortality. To be precise, any account of naturalized morality must identify those aspects of Nature that give rise to specific moral conclusions for which justifying arguments are adduced for those conclusions. It is the thesis of this book that Dewey has solved these problems in a most elegant fashion. EVOLUTION’S FIRST PHILOSOPHER 2 DARWIN’S INFLUENCE ON DEWEY I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. —Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, the year of Dewey’s birth. During his junior year as a student at the University of Vermont, Dewey was enrolled in a physiology course in which he read Thomas Henry Huxley’s (1825–1895) textbook (E1:ix). Since Huxley was known as Darwin’s bulldog, because he passionately and vociferously advocated and defended Darwin’s thesis, we can conclude that Dewey was well-versed in the intricacies of the theory of evolution early in his career. At the age of...