In Pragmatism's Evolution, Trevor Pearce details the impacts of evolutionary theory on the American pragmatist tradition. He follows the strategy of the “conversational model” (pursued by Sarah Hutton and others) to include “correspondence, lecture notes, minutes from formal and informal clubs, newspaper articles, and any other sources at our disposal. . . . This strategy corrects our tendency to dismiss those participants who are not canonical philosophers” (7). Two results of this are 1) increasing the breadth and diversity of scholars under consideration as pragmatists and 2) unearthing a neglected area of study: the impact of the “organism and environment” dialectic of Herbert Spencer's system of philosophy, also called evolutionary philosophy. Pearce notes that we know of Spencer in terms of the bedevilments of social Darwinism, but that “in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was almost impossible to discuss evolution without addressing Spencer's system of philosophy”...
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