The Invention of Altruism

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religion Of Humanity ◽  
British Culture

‘Altruism’ was coined by the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 1850s as a theoretical term in his ‘cerebral theory’ and as the central ideal of his atheistic ‘Religion of Humanity’. This book traces this new language of ‘altruism’ as it spread through British culture between the 1850s and the 1900s, and in doing so provides a portrait of Victorian moral thought. Drawing attention to the importance of Comtean positivism in setting the agenda for debates about science and religion, this volume challenges received ideas about both Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as moral philosophers. Darwin saw sympathy and love, not only selfishness and competition, throughout the natural world. Spencer was the instigator of an Anti-Aggression League and an advocate of greater altruism in Britain’s dealings with the ‘lower races’. The book also sheds light on the rise of popular socialism in the 1880s, on the creation of the idealist ‘altruist’ in novels of the 1890s, and on the individualistic philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and G. E. Moore—authors considered by some to be representative of fin de siècle ‘egomania’. This wide-ranging study in the history of ideas is relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.

Positivism, Science and 'The Scientists' in Porfirian Mexico

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Priego
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Leopoldo Zea

This book is intended for not only students and academics who undertake research on the history of Mexico during the half-century prior to the onset in 1910 of the Mexican Revolution, but also the parallel community of specialists on the history of ideas, philosophy and science throughout Latin America in this period. Its principal focus is to revisit the influential thesis of the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea that the ideological group dubbed ‘the scientists’ by their opponents were guided by Positivism, particularly as interpreted by Herbert Spencer. It begins by reviewing previous research upon the formation and differentiation of ‘the scientists’, and the black legend which assumes that they legitimised the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Having established what Spencer himself believed and wrote, it analyses the prolific writings of two of the leading ‘scientists’, Francisco Bulnes and Justo Sierra. It explains the eclectic nature of their discourses, derived from the works of not only Spencer but also Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte and other European writers, which reached Mexico in a fragmented fashion. It concludes that, far from forming a homogeneous elite clearly committed to to a conservative insistence, derived from Spencerian Positivism, on political stability and modernisation, ‘the scientists’ had an ambivalent relationship with Díaz.

The Historical Foundations of Symbolic Interactionism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Dingwall
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Plant Ecology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nature And Society

This chapter models a symbolic interactionist approach to the history of symbolic interactionism. It begins with a discussion of the term ‘symbolic interaction’ as devised by Herbert Blumer and the limits of its applicability to the body of work that represents this tradition. This owes at least as much to borrowings from plant ecology and evolutionary theory by sociologists in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, with influences from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Contemporary symbolic interactionism is distinguished from the post-modern version developed by Norman Denzin and associates; from the more structuralist legacy of Erving Goffman; and from ethnomethodology. The chapter then examines the influence of nineteenth century German philosophy and social thought on Chicago sociology. This is shown to draw on the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the work of Adam Smith and David Hulme, which also had a direct influence of its own. Ultimately, the story leads back to Stoic thought in ancient Greece and Rome from around 300 BCE to around 180 CE. Although its leaders have not had a great interest in the history of the approach, it is a genuine heir to long-running debates about humanity, nature and society rather than a fringe novelty of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Psychiatry in descent: Darwin and the Brownes

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
pp. 748-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Walmsley
Keyword(s):  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
History Of Psychiatry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Italian School ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
General Terms ◽  
History Of

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) enjoys an uneasy position in the history of psychiatry. In general terms, he showed a personal interest in the plight of the mentally ill and an astute empathy for psychiatric patients. On the other hand, he has generated derogatory views of insanity, especially through the writings of English social philosophers like Herbert Spencer and Samuel Butler, the Italian School of “criminal anthropology” and French alienists including Victor Magnan and Benedict Morel.

Organicism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Kumar Pokhrel
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Lewis Mumford

Modernist organicism emphasizes the interrelationship between the natural world and society, and links sociocultural changes with nature, biology, and aesthetic forms in imagining the human being—and society—as organic structures. Modernist organicist aesthetics follow the modernist organic principle of art, "form follows function." Crucial to the theory of modernist organicism are theories of biology and life such as those of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer. Importantly, modernist organicist aesthetics emphasizes a sense of place or region and ecological consciousness (e.g., the Garden City movement in Britain in the early 20th century and the cultural or anthropological turn of the 1930s). A list of modernist organicists might include D. H. Lawrence, and later Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Richard Llewellyn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Lewis Mumford, Willa Cather, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky, to name only a few. These artists viewed nature as a living force and showed the interdependence between nature and human beings.

Alfred Waterhouse’s Romanesque ‘Temple of Nature’: The Natural History Museum, London

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 257-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. B. Bullen
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Unusual Position ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Temple

The Natural History Museum in London is a spectacular building in many senses (Fig. 1). As one of the outstanding landmarks of high Victorian architecture, it was designed to draw attention both to itself and to its contents. No other museum building in Britain adopted a Romanesque style on this scale; no other building had used terracotta in such a rich and decorative manner, and no other building (other than, perhaps, the University Museum, Oxford) so curiously employed external decoration to illustrate its internal function. It was calculated to appeal to a wide public and its animal sculpture was selfconsciously didactic in the way in which a number of contemporary museum buildings were created to a programme. Planned as a showcase for the nation’s imperial scientific achievements, its appearance was strongly ecclesiastical. When it opened in 1881, The Times leader called it a ‘true Temple of Nature’, which, the writer said, demonstrated ‘the Beauty of Holiness’. But for many visitors in 1881 Nature had abandoned the temple for wilder places; she had bloodied her claws, and the beauty of holiness had been replaced by the more severe, mechanistic principles formulated by Charles Darwin.The concept of a large museum of natural history was the inspiration of the great naturalist Richard Owen. It was also the crowning achievement of his lifetime in science. The ‘Temple of Nature’ that Alfred Waterhouse built for him embodied Owen’s belief that the history of the natural world was not a matter of randomness and chance but the creation of a transcendent presence. In other words, the Natural History Museum is the expression of an ideology, and its shape, size, position, style and decoration are charged with legible meanings. Some of those meanings are readily interpreted, others less so, and although the building history of the museum has been well documented, many questions remain. Why, for example, was Waterhouse chosen as its architect? What spurred him on to use terracotta in such an original way? And above all why did he risk the unusual Romanesque style? The choice of Romanesque for such a building, although it was later imitated elsewhere, was highly original. But that choice was conditioned by a substantial web of aesthetic, social, and political factors. The Natural History Museum was not just Waterhouse’s creation; it was very much the product of its time. It was born of national and local politics; it was shaped by Owen’s unusual position in the scientific world, and it was an expression of Waterhouse’s passion for early medieval architecture.

Conclusion

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
New Words ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Victorian Science

This chapter uses the historical account of Victorian science, religion, and ethics as the basis for some brief reflections on philosophical problems and political pitfalls that are in some cases still associated with concepts of altruism. It was a sense of intellectual confinement that led nineteenth-century theorists such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer to invent new words with which to construct new scientific visions of humanity and society. Terms such as ‘sociology’ and ‘altruism’ made those new visions possible. People have now inherited the categories that they created, and those categories can themselves be confining rather than liberating. By providing accounts of the contingent circumstances in which they were created, the intellectual historian can draw attention to the provisional nature of our categories and can thus help to undermine the sense that they are inevitable, or even natural.

Evolution Before Darwin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
Evolution Of Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The City

It was long believed that evolutionary theories received an almost universally cold reception in British natural history circles in the first half of the nineteenth century. But recently serious doubt has been cast on this assumption. This book will be the first major study of what was the most important centre or pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought in the British Isles. It shows that Edinburgh in the late 1820s and early 1830s was witness to a veritable ferment of radical new ideas on the natural world, including speculation on the origin and evolution of life, at just the time when Charles Darwin was studying medicine in the city. Those who were students in Edinburgh at the time could have hardly avoided coming into contact with these new ideas, espoused as they were by many of professors, fellow students and acquaintances in Edinburgh. This book sheds new light on the genesis and development of one of the most important scientific theories in the history of western thought.

Lone Voices?

2021 ◽  
pp. 22-48
Author(s):  
David Hutchings
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Thomas Huxley ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter asks if Draper and White were indeed the sole originators of the conflict thesis, or whether there were others before and/or alongside them. Journeying from the French Revolution through to late Victorian England, key players are identified and discussed. These include Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, the X Club, and many more influential characters who spoke on or wrote about the relationship between science and religion. The conclusion is that Draper and White were far from alone: many other highly significant public figures had argued that there was an inherent conflict between theology and the scientific method in one way or another. The chapter then teases why it might be that Draper and White are so forcefully put forward in the literature as being the lone progenitors of the idea.

The Scientists' Declaration: Reflexions on Science and Belief in the Wake ofEssays and Reviews, 1864–5

1976 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. Brock ◽  
R. M. Macleod
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Early History ◽  
British Association ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

During the decades following the publication of Darwin'sOrigin of speciesin 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell'sEvidence of the antiquity of man(1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan'sVie de Jésus(1863), Pius IX's encyclical,Quanta cura, and the accompanyingSyllabus errarum, John Henry Newman'sApologia(1864), and Swinburne's notoriousAtalanta in Calydon(1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.

scholarly journals Creation, Evolution, and “The New Cosmic Philosophy”: William Todd Martin's Critique of Herbert Spencer

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes ◽  
David N. Livingstone
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Species Transformation ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in 1887 published The Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of “evolution” and “creation” by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.

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