ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some features of the revolutionary changes in world view and relate them to contextualism as typifying some of the major pragmatic emphases. In some ways the debate over evolution after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 was livelier and more heated among theologians, philosophers, scientists from fields other than biology, and popular writers than among biologists. The naturalistic approach of the contextualists assumes a basic continuity between lower, less complex forms of existence and higher, more complex ones such that the latter grow out of the former. From the point of view of the contextualists, with their acceptance of change and fallibilism, there are new things under the sun. The contextualistic interpretation of experience is very well summarized through a series of contrasts with what he called the orthodox view in Dewey’s famous essay on “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.”.
