The Idea of Progress Within and Beyond Evolutionary Theory

Diplôme Thèse The Idea of Progress Within and Beyond Evolutionary Theory eng 2025-06-26 2025-06-26 author De Cesare Silvia 0000-0002-0843-6250 931777 director Weber Marcel 0000-0003-2142-5043 659406 Département de philosophie (PHIL1) 230 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:188572 urn:nbn:ch:unige-1885723 L. 1189 The main aim of this dissertation is to disentangle the ambiguous attitude of evolutionary biologists towards organic progress, i.e. the idea that some change towards the better occurs over evolution. This is done by identifying two questions: I) Are there any theoretical arguments for using the normative terms “good” and “better” within evolutionary theory? II) If there are, can we clarify the idea that some “change towards the better” is conceptually implied by evolutionary theory? I argue that there are specific kinds of value, i.e. organic values, which allow us to meaningfully speak about improvements concerning living beings. A large part of this dissertation is devoted to show how this applies to local scales, before broadening the investigation to progress at a global scale. In the last chapter, I venture beyond evolutionary theory to discuss progress in human cultural evolution and more specifically in the technological domain. Dewey 100/501 89 Département de philosophie 3G false ef55cb3c-6076-4dae-a225-bc7d2d6729ae Thesis Restricted THESE_DECESARE_ARCHIVE.pdf 2470310 application/pdf Private 2026-12-31 757f553d976b43147fbf66db8d7ed069f221a6510bf4968986247f773083dec4 b97a92ed-7420-44fa-af82-fcbd59bee2ea Imprimatur Public Imprimatur_DE_CESARE.pdf 58166 application/pdf 1c92ed2abe23c0c29ab07bedb439673c1a03ef72a8bbce0f36b38412c5c5ce77 aaec862a-a912-4259-87c3-c2b9a0895295 Summary Public ResumeThese150mots.pdf 88689 application/pdf cc4bfbeda0c5c5b5c8383c6405c8e59359c9d6f122490edb3bd60947cca45df9 openAccess Faculté des lettres / Département de philosophie

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De Cesare, Silvia

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