Evolution in Science, Philosophy and the Public Sphere. The Example of Charles Sanders Peirce

This project focuses on the idea of evolution in philosophy and its relation to scholarly and public discourse. The historical example of the study is the work of the 19th century scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

The aim of the investigation is to gain a better understanding of the historical connection between pragmatism and evolutionary theory by identifying the factors that contributed to the development of Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy. Peirce did not just adopt the evolutionism of his time and advance it, he also sharply criticized the trivialization and generalization of Darwinian thought into an evolutionist doctrine of necessity as “necessitarianism”. Insofar as our current public discussion is still shaped by such a deterministic generalization of evolutionary processes (which we assume), it will also be the object of this Peircean critique. This is what gives the project its broader contemporary relevance.

We will first trace the development of Peirce’s evolutionary philosophy in its most important systematic and historical aspects and distinguish it from other variants of evolutionism. Here, the dialectical conception of evolution in Hegel’s (and Schelling’s) Idealism as well as the reference to different modes of evolution of organic species discussed at the time (Darwinism, Lamarckism) are especially important. In a second step we will examine the genesis of this evolutionary conceptualization in a broader context by extending the study to Peirce’s non-philosophical writings and correspondence as well as his readings in order to identify new connections and thus possible influences from scholarly and public discourse. In addition to works popularizing and disseminating Darwinian theory, such as those by Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, it is expected to identify further sources in the generally accessible journals that Peirce read and wrote for, such as “The Popular Science Monthly” and “The Nation”.

This project is supported by the ETH Zurich Research Grants programme. Participants
Prof. Dr. Michael Hampe
Fabienne Forster


This project is supported by the ETH Zurich Research Grants programme.