Philosophy is Not a Luxury

Philosophy is Not a Luxury Blog and Podcast

Found this great podcast hosted by Jeff Carreira, and turns out he also knows the wonderful Timothy Morton. So someone else also has an interest in Morton's work and American philosophy.

I really like Carreira's ideas about Darwin's influence on the early pragmatists. The influence from Darwin came in two major ways, argues Carreira. 1) idea of the continuity of species (no essential, fixed species boundaies and 2) theory of natural selection (James's conception of the "cash value" of ideas). He writes that

"The pragmatists were completely captivated by this vision of a universe that was continuous and that evolved through a process of minute changed that propagate forward through time. In essence they saw all of reality as a continuous evolving flow that relentlessly self-generates through changed that carry on into the future. They wanted to take Darwin's model of evolution and apply it to absolutely everything so that they could create a theory that could describe every aspect of the universe from the physical to the spiritual as a singular evolving event."

Not sure I agree with everything (does this gel with James's conception of the pluriverse?) but very very smart, and certainly Darwin had a profound influence upon James's "weltanschauung", but who wasn't reacting to Darwin after 1859? So cool.