From Aristotle's Teleology to Darwin's Genealogy: The Stamp of Inutility

Starting with Aristotle and moving on to Darwin, Marco Solinas outlines the basic steps from the birth, establishment and later rebirth of the traditional view of living beings, and its overturning by evolutionary revolution. The classic framework devised by Aristotle was still dominant in the 17th Century world of Galileo, Harvey and Ray, and remained hegemonic until the time of Lamarck and Cuvier in the 19th Century. Darwin's breakthrough thus takes on the dimensions of an abandonment of the traditional finalistic theory. It was a transition exemplified in the morphological analysis of useless parts, such as the sightless eyes of moles, already discussed by Aristotle, which Darwin used as a crowbar to unhinge the systematic recourse to final causes. With many excerpts, a chronological sequence and an analytical approach, this book follows the course of the two conceptions that have shaped the destiny of living beings in western culture.

From Aristotle to Darwin, from ancient teleology to contemporary genealogies, this book offers an overview of the birth and then persistence of Aristotle's framework into modernity, until its radical overthrow by the evolutionary revolution.

Marco Solinas holds the National Scientific Qualification as Professor of Philosophy; he has studied and researched in Florence, Nottingham, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Paris. He has written articles in important international reviews, and is author of Psiche: Platone e Freud (2008), also published in German with the title Via Platonica zum Unbewussten (2012).

PART I: THE ARISTOTELIAN TELEOLOGICAL TRADITION

The Original Framework

1. Consistency

2. To the Margins

3. Fixed in Time

4. Tools

5. Adaptations

6. Means of Defence

7. Unseeing Eyes

For and Against Aristotle

1. Regrafting and Divergences

2. Reception and Institutionalization

3. Rebirth

4. Mathematization

5. Teleological Experimentalism

6. Chicks

7. Procreations Preordained

8. The Last Stronghold

Indirect Supremacy

1. Persistence

2. Long Shadows

3. Subtext

4. Œconomia naturæ

5. Short Shadows

PART II: THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION

Crisis and Hegemony

1. Under Pressure

2. Elephant Bones

3. The Challenger

4. The Last Great Heir

Darwin's Breakthrough

1. Haunted

2. A Hundred Thousand Wedges

3. Barren Virgins

4. The Stamp of Inutility

5. Metamorphoses

6. Variations

7. Revolutions

8. Genealogies

Dry Branches

1. Obsolescence

2. A Double-edged Sword

3. Techne

4. On the Cusp

5. Archaisms

6. Corals

7. Circularity

8. Revenge