The impact of evolutionary theory on philosophy

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Evolution does become a major theme of American pragmatist thought, especially in John Dewey and, to a lesser extent, Richard Rorty.  It also takes up a very considerable position in contemporary philosophy of science.  It has also had an effect on the way that many people think about consciousness in the field of philosophy of mind (Daniel Dennett wrote a whole book called Darwin's Dangerous Idea and has written extensively on how realizing the the brain produces consciousness in both animals and humans forces us to move completely away from medieval and Cartesian conceptions of consciousness).  So, I think the theory of evolution has had a powerful influence on several strands of predominantly American philosophy.  It seems to have had less of an impact on continental thought because they moved very rapidly in the 20th century from schools of idealism to phenomenology to hermeneutics, deconstruction and the philosophy of language, all of which circumscribe scientific thought within other frameworks of understanding how meaning is created before the scientific project gets underway.  But, personally, I'm glad that American theories have taken evolution seriously in their various fashions; the theory surely does have profoundly important implications for how we understand ourselves and our relation to the natural order, so philosophers should take it seriously.