Volume 48, Number 7 · April 26, 2001
The Socrates of Cambridge
By Louis Menand
The Evolutionary Philosophy of Chauncey Wright
edited by Frank X. Ryan
Volume One: Philosophical Discussions with an introduction by Frank X. Ryan, 434 pp. Volume Two: Letters of Chauncey Wright with an introduction by Frank X. Ryan, 392 pp. Volume Three: Influence and Legacy with an introduction by Edward H. Madden, 263 pp. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, three-volume set, $295.00
Chauncey Wright was a village philosopher whose village happened to be Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was not a professor—he taught two courses at Harvard near the end of his life, and both were generally considered complete failures—and he never wrote a book. His production consisted almost entirely of dense and extremely dry periodical pieces, generally book reviews, for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The North American Review. He died, quite suddenly, in 1875, at the age of forty-five. But he flourished—and had an influence on such younger contemporaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes and William James—during one of the most disruptive decades in American intellectual history, the decade between the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, which forced the revision of many of the prevailing systems of philosophical and scien-tific thought, and the inauguration of Charles William Eliot as president of Harvard in 1869, which marked the closing of the era of the American college, with its emphasis on moral instruction, and the beginning of the era of the modern university, with its emphasis on scientific research.
Review, 5094 words
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