See also: Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley (May 4th 1825, Ealing - June 29th 1895, London) is a biologist and a British Philosophe .

British, friendly biologist of Charles Darwin, it was called “the bulldog of Darwin”. Huxley was convinced by the Théorie of the evolution. It published in 1863 Evidence ace to Man' S Place in Nature ( the Place of the man in nature ) in which it developed the thesis which the monkeys anthropoïdes are our close relatives what was worth the hatred of the not-evolutionists to him. It attracted itself also criticisms of the anarchist and Russian geographer Pierre Kropotkine which published the mutual aid: a factor of evolution in answer to the theses of Huxley wanting that the competition and the elimination of weakest are a factor of evolution.

Thomas Huxley was the founder of an big family of British academicians, in particular, his grandson Aldous Huxley (the writer), Sir Julian Huxley (first managing director of the UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund), and Sir Andrew Huxley (physiologist and prize winner of the Nobel Prize of physiology or medicine).

He worked on fossil fish, in particular on the Crossopterygien S which he separated from the Ganoide S and of the Dipneuste S. Its work had led it to consider that the man was not Omnivore by nature.

He is prize winner of the Royal Medal in 1852, of the Médaille Copley in 1888, of the Médaille linnéenne in 1890 and of the Médaille Darwin in 1894.

Huxley and philosophy

In the field of philosophy, Huxley left its trace like founder of the epiphenomenism, which it develops for the first time in 1874 in his article One the hypothesis that animals are automata and its history (in French: On the assumption according to which the animals are automats and the history of this theory ). This theory, which relates to the supposed reports/ratios of the spirit and the body, can be summarized in the following way:

1. the mental states are not physical statuses;
2. the mental states are caused or at least determined by the physical statuses of the body;
3. the mental states can nothing cause by themselves (not more other mental states that physical statuses).

In the same way, he is regarded as the inventor of the term “Agnosticisme” and regarded itself as agnostic.

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