Applying the Evolutionary Philosophy Worldview

A worldview is essentially a theory about the way the world works. Like all good theories, they form the basis of our beliefs. But we must also use them to form hypotheses and test them against experience. When these tests are confirmed, we act with confidence. When they are shown to be faulty, we must revise them or we will be doomed to repeated failures and disappointments.

Usually, our worldviews contain many unconscious or unexamined elements. They get shaped by a mixture of parenting, friendships, personal interactions, social institutions, and influences from the wider culture. Through the first 40 years of my life, this was the way my own worldview was shaped (with perhaps a bit more exploration and introspection than your average guy). But back in 2012, I began my philosophical writing career by trying to crystallise my worldview so it could be stated explicitly and exposed to deeper analysis by myself and others. That project produced four items:

1. A structured framework for how to "Know Thyself" with a series of short statements written in each element to express my own beliefs.
2. A summary list of 10 Tenets that were derived from this exercise to know myself.
3. A chronological survey of 60 of the most famous philosophers in history to see what they had thought and compare those thoughts to my own beliefs. I organised their beliefs using an evolutionary perspective as to whether I thought their ideas survived, needed to adapt, or had gone extinct. This produced a report of the Survival of the Fittest Philosophers.
4. A collection of these first three items with a few other essays, which I self-published in a book called Evolutionary Philosophy. You can still buy that through the normal outlets.

As I said above, worldviews must continue to adapt. And over the next few years I blogged about everything in these four items, which exposed the ideas to a wider audience and helped expand and alter my thinking. I published essays on other sites, magazine articles, and peer-reviewed papers to keep pushing my worldview to adapt and survive. From March 2015 until November 2017, I sought out the hardest tests for worldviews that the best thinkers in history have devised when I wrote about 100 philosophical thought experiments.

That last project in particular helped shape my worldview into the form I now use to present it on this website. But that doesn't mean it has hardened into place. An exciting new project with David Sloan Wilson's Prosocial World will hopefully gather a circle of evolutionary philosophers together to continue to discuss, debate, and evolve these ideas. Join in!

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© 2012 Ed Gibney