Mind and Cosmos
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Thomas Nagel
SBN13: 9780199919758ISBN10: 0199919755
Hardback, 144 pages
Sep 2012, Not Yet Published
Price: $24.95 (01)
Description
The modern materialist approach to life has utterly failed to explain such central features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, or value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel provides an insightful analysis of the Darwinian world view, offering a perspective quite different from that found in such books as Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. What we know about how mind and everything connected with it depends today on our ideas about the origin and spread of living organisms as a result of the universe's evolution. But Nagel states that "it is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection." What is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously? What is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection? Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. He does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
In spite of the great achievements of reductive materialism, it is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least of being open to their possibility.
Features
Author is a renowned philosopher
Makes a controversial argument
Engages in the heated contemporary debate over whether materialism and neo-Darwinism can explain the mind-body problem
Product Details
144 pages; 5-1/2 x 8-1/4;ISBN13: 978-0-19-991975-8ISBN10: 0-19-991975-5
About the Author(s)
Thomas Nagel is University Professor of Law and Phlosophy at New York University. His books include The Possibility of Altruism, The View from Nowhere, and What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. A renowned philosopher, he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize and the Balzan prize.
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
Por que a Companhia das Letras não publica um livros desses? Porque a editora está de rabo preso com o ateísmo pós-moderno, chique e perfumado de Richard Dawkins. Vamos lá, Luiz Schwarcz, coragem para publicar a visão contraditória de outros ateus muito mais inteligentes e competentes do que Dawkins.
