Reflections on the “Darwin‐Descartes” Problem

Darwin's evolutionary theory of the emergence of the human species posed an implicit challenge to proponents of what then was the major philosophy of mind, namely, Cartesian Dualism in all of its variants. In this paper, I argue that the pursuit of "materialist" solutions to the Cartesian problematic became intense after the work of Huxley and others in the Darwinian camp. I argue that the many efforts to "materialize" the "mind" ultimately failed due to the neglect by such theorists of the logic of the so-called "mental predicates" in language. I discuss this issue in relation to the work of Mead, Brentano, Chomsky, Toulmin, Shanker and Noble, and conclude that Wittgenstein's attack on the conception of a "private language" of the "mental" enables us to emancipate ourselves from the last philosophical hurdle confronting Darwinism: the problem of "mind".