“The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy”

Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, John Dewey (1859 – 1952) was one of American pragmatism’s early founders and arguably the most prominent American intellectual for the first half of the twentieth century.

Dewey's work emphasizes the importance of natural selection as a principle that explains the cumulative changes of nature and the evolution of mind, morals, and life. In his essay “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (1909) Dewey argues that a philosophy that humbles its pretensions to projecting hypotheses for the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out in practice. This shift in perspective leads to a more contingent and specific understanding of the conditions of generation, moving away from absolute finalities to specific consequences.

By integrating biological evolution, philosophical method, and pragmatist ethics, Dewey demonstrates how Darwinian ideas catalyzed a systematic revision of philosophical thought around the concepts of flux, adaptation, and experiential inquiry.

“The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” is short (eight pages) and takes about 20 minutes to read. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a lengthy entry on John Dewey; references to Darwin can be found in parts 2.4 (Perception/Sensation), 2.6 (Emotion), 3.1 (The Development of “Experience”) and 4.1 (The Organic Roots of Instrumentalism) of the entry.

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