Abstract

On some models of chance in Darwin starting from Wilhelm Windelband’s Doktorarbeit The incidence of the notion of chance in the evolutionary mechanism that Charles Darwin envisages in On the origin of species (1859) is one of the basic reasons why the father of the theory of evolution does not willingly use the term “evolution”. At the same time, this incidence also underlies the fact that many of those who, after the publication of Darwin's masterpiece, accepted the evolution of living things as a fact, were reluctant to recognize the core of “evolution” in the interaction between natural selection and the heritable intraspecific variations. However, it must be said that the notion of chance is, in general, anything but univocal. From this point of view, the essay aims to synthetically highlight the presence of some "modes" of chance, which interact with each other, in Darwin's «long argument». In order to reach this end, it will resort to the investigations into the "causal notion of chance" that the neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband develops in his doctoral dissertation, entitled Die Lehren vom Zufall and published in 1870.