Themester Colloquium: Robert Richards

Please join us for one of the opening Themester events through the College of Arts and Sciences! We are pleased to present a Colloquium speaker through the Department of History & Philosophy of Science at Indiana University.

Friday, September 11, 2009
4:00-6:00 p.m.
Ballantine 013

Robert Richards, Morris Fishbien Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Chicago, will present, “Darwin’s Metaphysics of Mind and the Continuity of Nature.”

Abstract:
Prior to publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, naturalists, whether they were Aristotelians, Cartesians, Kantians, or Associationists assumed a disjunction between man and the rest of the living world. Darwin and many other British naturalists in the Associationist tradition of David Hume and Jeremy Bentham did not believe an insurmountable intellectual barrier existed between animals and man—but humans did exhibit considerably larger intellectual capacity. In the moral sphere, however, virtually all naturalist assumed a deep divide between animal instinct and human moral behavior. Darwin had to demonstrate two propositions for his theory to be successful: that man’s big brain could derive from modest animal antecedents and that moral behavior could arise out of animal antecedents. He solved both problems in a similar way, one that is now being rediscovered in contemporary science. Both Darwin’s conclusion and modern evolutionary science have dramatic implications for any religious solution to his problems.”