Pajewski, Alessandro (Author)
Richards, Robert John
University of Chicago
Edition Details: Advisor: Richards, Robert J.
Physical Details: 461 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation analyzes David Hume's writings as a source for Charles Darwin's scientific work, and it concludes that Hume was a crucial source for the development of Darwin's ideas. Darwin derived from Hume his analogy-based notion of causation, the idea of fitness being context-dependent, the practice of theoretical history, the historicist critique of natural theology, the principle of population, and a particular interpretation of instinct-based altruism. Darwin read Hume's principal works at several points in his life, including during the fatidic months of 1938 when he devised the theory of natural selection. Hume's theories were also imparted on Darwin from his family, especially from his grandfather Erasmus, and from members of the Scottish enlightenment, such as Dugald Stewart, through the works of Charles Lyell. The motivation for Hume's work sprang from what he perceived as a failure by Stoic philosophy to provide a solid guide for human life. According to Hume, analogy plays a central and foundational role for all human knowledge, and it is the base of causal inferences. Cicero's rhetoric was the primary source for his treatment of analogy. Darwin explained evolutionary change by long chains of analogic inferences. Hume's epistemology allowed him to devise a practice of theoretical history apt at explaining a certain order or arrangement through the hypothetical reconstruction of previous historical processes, extending causal reasoning beyond direct observation, with general principles being decisively altered and modulated by local contingencies. From Lyell, Darwin derived Hume's method of projecting observable causes back into long periods of past time in order to come up with hypothetical explanations of what processes were at play, to compare such hypotheses with historical records, and finally to use the comparison as feedback to refine knowledge of observable causes. A corollary of Hume's treatment of analogy is the notion that causal effectiveness and fitness are context dependent. A major source for this idea was the casuistic tradition at La Flèche, where Hume wrote his Treatise. Darwin adopted Hume's historicist approach, arguing that the present state of a biological system is not established in function of the present (or future) economy of the world, but on the basis of a sequence of historical local circumstances. In Hume's hands, theoretical history became a conscious attack on natural theology, as it could explain order without requiring design. Darwin was influenced by the works of William Paley and Thomas Malthus at the beginning of his career, but later on he detached himself from the requirements of natural theology. The emotional logic behind Darwin's research was animated by the urge to attune with mortality and find redemption for individual deaths. The maturation of Darwin's beliefs proceeded through the representation of the emotional ambivalence of nature, as expressed in his shifting use of metaphors: progressive design, blind mechanism, source of abundance, and destructive paroxysm. Darwin also embraced Hume's notion that morality has an instinctual base. Hume considered instincts to be contingently and limitedly adaptive, not absolutely. He also added that their impulses are substantially altered and redirected by cultural and customary factors. The moral prevalence of altruism is the contingent result of an historical process. In his later years, Darwin also embraced the Humean notion of a productive and autonomous role for human customs: complementary, rather than in opposition, to biological nature. Hume's last contribution to the theory of natural selection was his formulation of the first half of the principle of population, namely that population naturally increases according to a geometrical ratio.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. (2012). ProQuest Doc. ID 1081704515.
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