SOURCE: "The Origin and Development of Westermarck's Moral Philosophy," in Acta Philosophica Fennica, Vol. 34, 1982, pp. 25-60.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1965, Wright relies on unpublished proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Finland to illustrate Westermarck's intellectual development.

I

The main purpose of this essay is to clarify a bit of intellectual history having to do with Edward Westermarck's scholarly activities. Very little has been written about Westermarck's moral philosophy and the development of his thinking within the context of the history of ideas generally. We know that he labored for nearly twenty years on his great work The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas¹ and it would be natural to suppose that his ideas went through many phases, with earlier thoughts being abandoned in favor of later ones. But not much is known about Westermarck's early development as a philosopher. On the contrary, doubt has...