Tag Archives: Charles Darwin

Our Evolutionary Crisis

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I certainly want to continue with our discussion and I want to explore the profound ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce further, but first I wanted to say a few words in general that I have been thinking about. As some of you may know I have been a student of a spiritual teacher named Andrew Cohen and […]

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What is a “something” anyway? further consideration of Darwin and Dewey

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In my last post I wrote about Darwin’s recognition that the idea of separate species was just that, an idea. And, as Brian astutely commented on that post, that doesn’t mean that there is no truth to the distinction of one species to the next. It does though points to a particular challenge in human […]

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Darwin and the Illusion of Separate Species

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The American Pragmatists were all profoundly influenced by Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The originators of Pragmatism, including Charles Sanders Peirce who coined the term and William James who popularized it, were all part of an intellectual circle called The Metaphysical Club. This discussion group met for a short while during the […]

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Conscious Evolution and Free Will?

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Part of the controversy over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has always been its deterministic tone. Darwin saw evolution as happening through the combination of chance variation and natural selection. The theory goes something like this. Individual organisms of any species are born with variations that occur randomly. Some of these variations are inheritable, meaning […]

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Charles Darwin and the directionality of Evolution

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I have often heard and have at times gotten into arguments about whether the process of evolution has directionality.  And this argument has seen lots of air time in the media recently. I realized the other day that there is a fictional dialog that lives in my head about this topic that misleads me about […]

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The Curious Case of John Elof Boodin vs. Charles Darwin

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The American philosophy of Pragmatism was in many ways a direct response to Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The early Pragmatists were trying to apply the same logic to philosophy that Darwin had applied to evolution. At the same time the Pragmatists were generally apposed to the idea that chance mutation and […]

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John Dewey’s Insight

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John Dewey was younger than William James, but they were contemporaries. Dewey was profoundly influenced by reading James’ book “Principles of Psychology” and became, along with James and Charles Sanders Peirce, the third of a trinity of great thinkers that developed American Pragmatism.   Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1859, the same year […]

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