Brewer, Mark A. (2025) On Dawkins: The Biologist’s Shadow on the Cave Wall. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Richard Dawkins is widely celebrated as a key figure in contemporary evolutionary biology, but his intellectual legacy resists simple classification.
While he is often framed as a hardline defender of empirical science and naturalism, the structure of his contributions reveals a more ambivalent posture—one that is deeply philosophical, even as it disavows philosophy.
This essay argues that Dawkins’ enduring influence derives not from experimental discoveries or novel data, but from his role as a conceptual architect: a theorist who reshapes how we think about genes, selection, and organismal design. Through close examination of his major works, public statements, and the epistemic frameworks he deploys, I suggest that Dawkins’ authority operates through what might be termed a “rhetorical empiricism”—a stance that foregrounds science while covertly engaging in metaphysical and conceptual argumentation.
The central irony is that Dawkins embodies a form of philosophy he explicitly rejects: a speculative, systematizing, and normatively charged philosophy of biology.
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