Thoughts on The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy

When you read this, you may wonder "Why is Dr. Pope making us read this essay? Are we going to talk about teaching Intelligent Design or something?"

Well, we can talk about that. But that's not the reason I assigned this piece. I think this piece is essential to understanding Dewey's ideas about knowledge, change, and the Absolute.

To put it very briefly, prior to Darwin the basis of philosophy was that knowledge was fixed and absolute. Anything worth knowing was Final. Darwin calls the existence of any essential quality of anything into question, by pointing out that organisms change over time and they do so as a result of environmental factors interacting (trans-acting?) with random changes in organisms. Thus what a thing IS is ultimately hard to pin down.

Dewey takes this insight and wants to apply it to philosophy, calling into question philosophy's traditional search for an Absolute Reality beyond our own. He wants us instead to focus on more immediate concerns:

"To improve our education, to ameliorate our manners, to advance our politics, we must have recourse to specific conditions of generation." (44) Specifics, not abstract generalities. Not essences. It's the move from Absolutism to Pragmatism.

Think this doesn't apply to education? Think of the difference between these two ways of describing a child who is acting up:

"He's a bad kid."

"He's a kid who acts badly."