xxxii Prologueyears of stasis,”^36 he presented the Received View, in part relying on Joseph’s book,^37
in part on Mayr and Simpson. The foundations of classi cation rest on Aristotle’s
notion of de nition,^38 while a contrary tradition, beginning with Adanson, treated
taxa as disjuncts of properties, which themselves became the essence of a species in
classical Aristotelian form. The moderns—Simpson, Dobzhansky, Mayr—moved
to a reproductive isolation conception, founded on evolution. In a much later work,
he devoted a chapter^39 in which the Received View is expanded and in many ways
revised: Plato is relegated to the background and Aristotelians offered a view of
species as types from which deviations were possible. After Aristotle, we reach
Linnaeus, then Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy, and then the ideal morpholo-
gists until we meet Darwin, followed by the New Systematics group—Dobzhansky,
Mayr, Julian Huxley, and so forth.
In each of these, and others^40 the Received View runs roughly thus:
Plato de ned Form (eidos) as something that had an essence, and Aristotle set up a way
of dividing genera (genē) into species (eidē) so that each species shared the essence of
the genus, and each individual in the species shared the essence of the species. Linnaeus
took this idea and made species into constant and essentialistic types. Darwin overcame
this essentialism. Later naturalists, under the in uence of genetics, discovered the bio-
logical species concept, in which species are found to be populations without essences,
but with common ancestry. Population thinking replaces typological essentialism.THE FAILURE OF THE RECEIVED VIEW
In between Aristotle (d 322 ) and Linnaeus’s rst works on classi cation (fl 1750
) there is a 2000-year gap. What happened in that intervening period? It was a
period of active philosophy, as it includes the bulk of the classical period, not to men-
tion the high period of Arab science and scholarship,^41 the medieval debates on logic(^36) Hull 1965a, Hull 1965b.
(^37) Hull, personal communication. As Hull’s ideas have been so in uential, it should be noted that at
about this time he also published a brief history [Hull 1967] in which he went into more detail, and
which cites Joseph in note 3. In it, he notes that the observation that things do not always breed true
was made by Aristotle and Theophrastus, and that therefore species do allow variation and diver-
gence from the type. Even so, Hull still skips from Aristotle to Cesalpino, with only a short allusion
to the Great Chain of Being.
(^38) Hull 1965a, 318f.
(^39) Chapter 3, “Up from Aristotle,” Hull 1988b.
(^40) For example, Wiley 1981, 70–72, to take one example at random.
(^41) Which I do not cover here. Some secondary sources indicate that not much happened in the Islamic
high period with respect to biology, but given my experience with commentators on the western
sources, I tend to doubt it. Somebody with access to the material might like to investigate this period.
One possibly important thinker is the ninth century writer, Al-Jāhiz (776–868), who compiled an
extensive Book of Animals (Kitab al-Hayawan). Al-Asma‘i (740–828) wrote a number of texts, mostly
anthological, on animals and plants. The twelfth century author, Al-Marwazī (1056–1124), wrote The
Nature of Animals [cf. McDonald 1988, Egerton 2012]. Islamic authors often attempt to make out that
these medieval Islamic thinkers are directly plagiarized by European authors such as Darwin [e.g.,
Bayrakdar 1983]. However, as with Osborn’s work [1894] this is based on perceived similarities rather
than actual lineal in uences.