Abstract

The following essay aims to analyze Herbert Spencer’s philosophy by looking through the several evolutionary outlooks which grew in the United States of America among the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century. Focusing on the most distinctive features of the Synthetic Philosophy, it will be possible to highlight the “atypical” positivism of Spencer, whose epistemological and cosmological assumptions, despite their scientific foundation, seemed to give rise to some ambiguous metaphysical interpretations. This issue will be better explained looking at the success that Spencer’s philosophy obtained in the American culture along the years of the so called Gilded Age: an historical context in which Spencerism often turned into theism, orthogenesis and finalism.