In Pragmatism’s Evolution, Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey’s 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy—but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey’s claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers? Although the various thinkers associated with pragmatism—from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond—were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910—from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics—in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology.
Trevor Pearce is associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the coeditor of Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences and a contributor to The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics and The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead. His articles have been published in HOPOS, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and many other publications.
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures Abbreviations of Manuscript Sources Abbreviations of Scholarly Editions Note to the Reader Introduction Chapter 1: The Metaphysical Club and the Origin of Species Chapter 2: Products of the Environment: Spencer’s Challenge Spencerian Evolution Spencerian Psychology Spencerian Sociology Chapter 3: Evolution at School: Educating a New Generation Evolution in College Evolution in Graduate School Teaching Evolution Chapter 4: “Hegelianism Needs to Be Darwinized”: Evolution and Idealism Hegel and Evolution The Organism-Environment Dialectic Evolutionary Strivings Chapter 5: Weismannism Comes to America: The Factors of Evolution The Reception of Weismann Peirce and Neo-Lamarckism Dewey and the Spencer-Weismann Debate Chapter 6: Pragmatist Ethics: Evolution, Experiment, and Social Progress Fieldwork in Ethics Organism and Environment in Social Reform Social Science and Social Evolution Eugenics and Civilization Chapter 7: Pragmatist Logic: Evolution, Experiment, and Inquiry The “Natural History” Approach Evolutionary Experimentalism Conclusion Acknowledgments Index
