ISBN10: 0199919755, ISBN13: 9780199919758, [publisher: OUP USA 2012-11-22, New York |Oxford] Hardcover Language: ENG
[London, United Kingdom] [Publication Year: 2012]

ISBN10: 0199919755, ISBN13: 9780199919758, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Hardcover Hardcover. The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and 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.Since minds are features ofbiological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin oflife and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kindmay 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 thephysical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for ...

ISBN10: 0199919755, ISBN13: 9780199919758, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Hardcover Hardcover. The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and 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.Since minds are features ofbiological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin oflife and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kindmay 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 thephysical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for ...