Species

Prologue xxxv

This is an essay in the history of ideas (although conceptual history is prefer-

able), and in particular the ideas that came before and might be demonstrated or

fairly thought to have contributed to the ideas in play in biological thought about

species and classication. “History of ideas” has become uncommon and somewhat

disparaged by professional historians, and this is understandable given the whiggish,

presentist bias much of it has exhibited. I am well aware of the problems faced by the

historian of ideas, as described by John Greene:

Of all histories the history of ideas is the most difcult and elusive. Unlike things, ideas

cannot be handled, weighed, and measured. They exert a powerful force in human his-

tory, but a force difcult to estimate.^54

But history of ideas is necessary if we are to understand why ideas are as they are

in internal terms; that is, in terms of the content of the ideas. There is also a need

for an externalist history of ideas, of the context, but this is much harder to do, and

in any event cannot be done without at least some awareness of the internal history.

Without defending this further, the history of ideas is at least intrinsically interesting

for those seeking to explain current scientic ideas, given that science, as an intel-

lectual set of traditions, relies on the notions of the past as a starting point in the way

it develops them further. Knowing the past may also help scientists to avoid repeating

it unnecessarily.^55

We shall not refer much to the usual labels and banners applied to the various

thinkers; terms such as idealist, transcendentalist, empiricist, and so on. This is

because it is my experience that such absolute distinctions ride roughshod over the

complexities and similarities of these thinkers. Calling somebody a “transcenden-

talist” implies they were interested only in Platonic ideas. In the case of a Cuvier

or an Agassiz, that is a hard claim to sustain—they attended closely to empirical

evidence, and for all their shortcomings, neither merely made inferences sub specie

aeternitatis, as Plato did. And in abandoning these hard distinctions I have found,

I believe, a similarity of conception I call the generative conception of species that

runs through most, if not all, pre-Darwinian thinkers and researchers on the topic

of species, and which is found even in post-Darwinians, and Darwin as well. As

Amundson noted, we encounter a “conceptual tangle”^56 when we attend to the actual

history of concepts.

As always in the history of ideas, much of the earlier material must be drawn in

terms of resemblance and succession. Because one author—say Porphyry—discusses

ideas that are similar to another’s—say Aristotle—is not in itself reason to believe

either that there is a direct relationship of intellectual ancestry or even an indirect

relationship unless the one cites or refers to the other (as Porphyry does Aristotle).

Classical authors often failed to provide a proper modern scholarly apparatus of cita-

tions and imputed credit. Prior to the “biological problem” of species beginning with

(^54) Greene 1963, 11.
(^55) I am inuenced by David Hull’s evolutionary conception of science science [Hull 1983, Hull 1986,
Hull 1988a, Hull 1988b, Hull 1990], and have tried to present my own evolutionary account of science
and culture in this vein before [e.g., Wilkins 2002, Wilkins 2008].
(^56) Amundson 1998, 159.