The ultimate basis of the conception of the Origin of Species Authors Carlos Castrodeza Departamento de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia. Facultad de Filosofia, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Keywords: historical hermeneutics, Darwin, natural selection Abstract Taking into account well known facts about Darwin’s history, the origin of his ideas on the origin of species is discussed not in a customary manner, but rather from the double perspective of the sociology of knowledge and the psychology of epistemic creation, which does not take into consideration the concept of genius. The aim is to clarify how historical evidence should never articulate quasi-magical properties in the process of discovery and its further justification (ideas like considering the character under scrutiny to be either in advance of his time, or that he ‘saw’ what nobody did, or that he had a privileged mind for understanding the world, etc.). In brief, Darwin’s case should be taken as paradigmatic in the sense alluded to. Downloads PDF (Català) Issue Nova època, vol. 3 (2) : 2010 Section Articles License The intellectual property of articles belongs to the respective authors.On submitting articles for publication to the journal Actes d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica, authors accept the following terms:Authors assign to Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (a subsidiary of Institut d’Estudis Catalans) the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution of the articles submitted for publication to Actes d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica.Authors answer to Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT) for the authorship and originality of submitted articles.Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for the reproduction of all graphic material included in articles.SCHCT declines all liability for the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by authors.The contents published in the journal, unless otherwise stated in the text or in the graphic material, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) 3.0 Spain licence, the complete text of which may be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en. Consequently, the general public is authorised to reproduce, distribute and communicate the work, provided that its authorship and the body publishing it are acknowledged, and that no commercial use and no derivative works are made of it.Actes d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of the published articles.
