University of Chicago
Conceptual And Historical Studies Of Science
PhD, 2010
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States of America
  •  53
    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 w…Read more
  •  16
    Naturalism and Despair: George Herbert Mead and Evolution in the 1880s
    In Hans Joas & Daniel R. Huebner (eds.), The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, University of Chicago Press. pp. 117-143. 2016.
    Trevor Pearce examines Mead’s early intellectual development and shows in detail how difficult it was for a young Christian at the time to integrate Darwin into his worldview. Pearce explores the deep existential crisis that resulted from these difficulties. Based on new and newly reevaluated biographical material, Pearce traces the development of Mead’s views through his years in college, in a longer phase of existential reorientation, and as a student of philosophy and psychology. Pearce also …Read more
  •  800
    In their 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, D. McShea and R. Brandon present a principle that they call ‘‘ZFEL,’’ the zero force evolutionary law. ZFEL says (roughly) that when there are no evolutionary forces acting on a population, the population’s complexity (i.e., how diverse its member organisms are) will increase. Here we develop criticisms of ZFEL and describe a different law of evolution; it says that diversity and complexity do not change when there are no evolutionary causes.
  •  13
    Beth L. Eddy. Evolutionary Pragmatism and Ethics. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016. (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53 (3): 495-498. 2017.
    This short book is a history of what might be called the Chicago school of pragmatist evolutionary ethics. It places John Dewey and Jane Addams in their late-nineteenth-century intellectual context, emphasizing in particular how they drew on the work of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Peter Kropotkin. Eddy suggests in her introduction that because today’s “social climate” is similar in many respects to that of the United States circa 1900, pragmatism may offer “significant insights for…Read more
  •  37
    “Protoplasm Feels”: The Role of Physiology in Charles Sanders Peirce’s Evolutionary Metaphysics
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1): 28-61. 2018.
    This essay is an attempt to explain why Charles Sanders Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics would not have seemed strange to its original 1890s audience. Building on the pioneering work of Andrew Reynolds, I will excavate the scientific context of Peirce’s Monist articles—in particular “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence,” both published in 1892—focusing on the relationship between protoplasm, evolution, and consciousness. I argue that Peirce’s discussions should be understood in the conte…Read more
  •  22
    Cheryl Misak. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (review)
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 4 (1): 172-176. 2014.
    Most analytic philosophers, when asked about American pragmatism, simply scoff. Like Bertrand Russell, they attribute to the pragmatists the view that “we may as well believe what is most convenient” (101). Cheryl Misak’s book is a history designed to silence the scoffers—to show that pragmatism should be taken more seriously. She certainly achieves this goal, but her framing may end up exacerbating the “with us or against us” tone of conversations about the pragmatists and their account of trut…Read more
  •  27
    Meeting Report: Fourth ISHPSSB Off-Year Workshop (review)
    Biology and Philosophy 26 (2): 315-316. 2011.
    Report of the 2010 off-year workshop of ISHPSSB at the University of Western Ontario
  •  74
    The Dialectical Biologist, circa 1890: John Dewey and the Oxford Hegelians
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (4): 747-777. 2014.
    I argue in this paper that rather than viewing John Dewey as either a historicist or a naturalist, we should see him as strange but potentially fruitful combination of both. I will demonstrate that the notion of organism-environment interaction central to Dewey’s pragmatism stems from a Hegelian approach to adaptation; his turn to biology was not necessarily a turn away from Hegel. I argue that Dewey’s account of the organism-environment relation derives from the work of Oxford Hegelians such as…Read more
  •  72
    There is still a great deal of debate over what counts as a constraint and about how to assess experimentally the relative importance of constraints and selection in evolutionary history. I will argue that the notion of a constraint on variation, and thus the selection-constraint distinction, depends on two specifications: (1) what counts as a variant -- constraints limit or bias the production of what? and (2) range of assessment -- over what range of times or conditions is the variation assess…Read more
  •  22
    Naomi Beck’s very readable book examines the reception of Herbert Spencer’s work among Italian and French intellectuals from 1860 to 1900, focusing on the role of biology in analyses of society and politics. Although its topic is narrow, the book is relevant to historians interested in Social Darwinism, positivism, early social science, and comparative history. It also provides a case study for scholars of the reception and transformation of ideas.
  •  87
    Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first m…Read more
  •  46
    The idea of organism-environment interaction, at least in its modern form, dates only to the mid-nineteenth century. After sketching the origins of the organism-environment dichotomy in the work of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, I will chart its metaphysical and methodological influence on later scientists and philosophers such as Conwy Lloyd Morgan and John Dewey. In biology and psychology, the environment was seen as a causal agent, highlighting questions of organismic variation and plasti…Read more
  •  56
    Ecosystem Engineering, Experiment, and Evolution
    Biology and Philosophy 26 (6): 793-812. 2011.
    This paper argues that philosophers should pay more attention to the idea of ecosystem engineering and to the scientific literature surrounding it. Ecosystem engineering is a broad but clearly delimited concept that is less subject to many of the “it encompasses too much” criticisms that philosophers have directed at niche construction . The limitations placed on the idea of ecosystem engineering point the way to a narrower idea of niche construction. Moreover, experimental studies in the ecosys…Read more
  •  66
    Philosophy of Biology in the Twenty-First Century (review)
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 312-315. 2012.
    Essay review of Michael Ruse (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Biology (2008).
  •  48
    “A Great Complication of Circumstances” – Darwin and the Economy of Nature
    Journal of the History of Biology 43 (3): 493-528. 2010.
    In 1749, Linnaeus presided over the dissertation "Oeconomia Naturae," which argued that each creature plays an important and particular role in nature 's economy. This phrase should be familiar to readers of Darwin, for he claims in the Origin that "all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature." Many scholars have discussed the influence of political economy on Darwin's ideas. In this paper, I take a different tack, showing that Darwin's idea o…Read more
  •  73
    From 'Circumstances' to 'Environment': Herbert Spencer and the Origins of the Idea of Organism–Environment Interaction
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (3): 241-252. 2010.
    The word ‘environment’ has a history. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a singular, abstract entity—the organism—interacting with another singular, abstract entity—the environment—was virtually unknown. In this paper I trace how the idea of a plurality of external conditions or circumstances was replaced by the idea of a singular environment. The central figure behind this shift, at least in Anglo-American intellectual life, was the philosopher Herbert Spencer. I examine Spencer’s w…Read more
  •  19
    “Science Organized”: Positivism and the Metaphysical Club, 1865–1875
    Journal of the History of Ideas 76 (3): 441-465. 2015.
    In this paper, I explore the work of several positivists involved with the "Metaphysical Club" of Cambridge, MA in the early 1870s -- John Fiske, Chauncey Wright, and Francis Ellingwood Abbot. Like the logical positivists of the 1930s, these philosophers were forced to answer a key question: with so many of its traditional domains colonized by science and so many of its traditional questions dismissed as metaphysical or useless, what is left for philosophy to do? One answer they gave was that ph…Read more
  •  73
    Convergence and Parallelism in Evolution: A Neo-Gouldian Account
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (2): 429-448. 2012.
    Determining whether a homoplastic trait is the result of convergence or parallelism is central to many of the most important contemporary discussions in biology and philosophy: the relation between evolution and development, the importance of constraints on variation, and the role of contingency in evolution. In this article, I show that two recent attempts to draw a black-or-white distinction between convergence and parallelism fail, albeit for different reasons. Nevertheless, I argue that we s…Read more