Abstract

[Charles Darwin, Philosopher for the 21st Century] This is, by and large, a review paper which discusses the current situation and future prospects of a philosophy based on the Darwinian view of life. The first section reflects on Wittgenstein's aversion to Darwinism, which was a symptom of his construal of philosophy as conceptual analysis free from empirical inquiry. The contemporary turn to Darwinian considerations in philosophy is a consequence of the Quinean rejection of conceptual analysis in favour of a continuity between philosophy and empirical science. The second section synthesizes some recent views on the character of Darwin's theory -- the structure of his argument and the evidence for his premises. The third section moves on to a Darwinian epistemology, where the main contention concerns the possibility of deriving epistemic norms from evolutionary history. Appeals to evolution in an attempt to account for the possibility of misrepresentation and the debate over original versus derived intentionality both play a central role in philosophy of mind, explored in the fourth section. Finally, the fifth section turns to ethics, in particular a recent research into the evolutionary origins of moral behaviour.