Neurath's Boat

How important was Darwin to philosophy?

Evolutionary theory makes it impossible for biological species to be natural kinds (or at the very least, if naturalness comes in degrees, they're very marginal natural kinds).  Biological species were, for Aristotle, a central example of forms.  Even if there is a good way to make sense of forms of some kind, evolutionary theory again, for the same reasons, makes it clear that there can't be forms corresponding to biological species.

This seems to have profound consequences for many of the hopes of rationalism; many earlier attempts to provide rationalist accounts of human nature seem to have been heavily dependent on there being a form of humanity (and even self-proclaimed critics of rationalism like Kant often make claims which seem to require something very much like such a form).  This is especially clear in the case of ethics.  On the Aristotelian, form-centered view of human nature, variations in humanity are deviations from the basic form.  This made it at least conceivable that undesirable features of humanity could be explained away as merely deviations (if in some cases depressingly frequent ones), leaving open the possibility that the form could serve a normative purpose, that one could derive what humans ought to do from the form of humanity.[1]

Undercutting this is a major change.  On the other hand, Newtonian physics already seems to carve up the world along lines very different from those suggested by Aristotle's forms, and as a result skepticism about viewing any aspect of the world in terms of forms was already well established long before Darwin.  Certainly there were many critics of Aristotelian natural-law morality before Darwin, including, for example, the whole empiricist tradition, which also rejected forms in general.

So, how much difference did the additional reasons Darwin provided for being skeptical of biological forms make?  And, conversely, did the rejection of forms in the British Empiricist tradition help in any way in making something like an evolutionary theory seem conceivable to Darwin and his contemporaries?

[1] While evolutionary theory does provide some ability to distinguish the normal from the abnormal (as discussed by Millikan), the lines are much murkier, and not revealed by reason, and prospects for plausibly lining up the evolutionarily normal with the morally good are far worse.

What are we supposed to think of Euthyphro?

One of the reasons I like to cover the philosophical classics when I teach is that they're usually classics for a reason; even after dozens of readings, I often come to new insights about them.  One point that has recently been nagging at me is the presentation of Euthyphro in the dialogue named for him.  Most readers and interpreters seem to take a fairly dim view of him (as I've also tended to do in the past).  However, it has to be admitted that he's committed to the attractive idea that justice should be impartial, and he's willing to stand up for what he believes is right against public opinion.

Furthermore, and this is the point I hadn't really noticed before, he shows what really has to be considered a fairly impressive level of open-mindedness and commitment to the pursuit of truth.  It's made clear at the beginning of the dialogue that he knows who Socrates is, and that he apparently has a high opinion of Socrates.  Knowing who Socrates is, Euthyphro shows no reluctance to engage in a discussion with him.  Further, after he's run into considerable difficulties (and after Socrates has said some at least borderline blasphemous things), Socrates offers him a chance to back out of the discussion (at 9e), but Euthyphro does not hesitate to insist that the investigation should continue.  It is only after another long stretch where no progress is made (with Socrates being, as usual, fairly rude, and throwing in a few more borderline blasphemies), that Euthyphro gives up on the discussion and falls back on conventional answers to Socrates' question (at 14b).

Now, perhaps the conventional answer at the end deserves the abuse that Socrates gives it, but it's not only a bad answer, it also seems quite unworthy of Euthyphro, given what we'd seen of him prior to this point (at the outset he was far more concerned with what was right than with popular, conventional notions).  So what's going on here?  Has talking with Socrates made Euthyphro worse than he started?  What was Plato's intention in presenting the story this way?

The persistance of dualism

The abstract of this paper about a certain rare condition claims to present evidence "this condition, long thought to be entirely psychological in origin, actually has a neurological basis."  I suspect that the authors would claim not to take dualism at all seriously, and yet only a dualist should think that it is even possible for a condition to be entirely psychological in a way which contrasts with it being neurological.  Any materialist should think that all entirely psychological conditions are also neurological.