Metaphysics, Materialism & the Evolution of Mind PDF Download

Author: Charles Darwin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Charles Darwin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description

Author: Charles Darwin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226136592
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
First published in 1974 as a companion volume to Darwin on Man by Howard E. Gruber, Paul Barrett’s transcriptions of Darwin’s M and N notebooks served to shed new light on the evolutionist’s methods and motivation. According to Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Times Book Review, “Darwin kept [these notebooks] primarily in 1838, when he was 29 years old. In them, he recorded his early conviction of evolutionary continuity between humans and all other animals. . . . These notebooks display all the features of humanistic intellect that his detractors denied. We find erudition in his comments on Plato, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Whewell, Burke, Montaigne, Lessing and Spencer. . . . We appreciate an artistic bent in his delight with nature and her prophet Wordsworth. . . . We grasp the breadth of his bold attempt to clothe all human thought and behaviour in a new evolutionary garb. . . . Charles Darwin was reconstructing the world and he knew exactly what he was doing.”

Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199919755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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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 of biological 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 of life 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 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 the physical sciences, reductive materialism 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 in being open to their possibility.

Author: Mario Bunge
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048192250
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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This book discusses two of the oldest and hardest problems in both science and philosophy: What is matter?, and What is mind? A reason for tackling both problems in a single book is that two of the most influential views in modern philosophy are that the universe is mental (idealism), and that the everything real is material (materialism). Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged. Besides, both groups tend to ignore the other levels of existence—chemical, biological, social, and technological. If such levels and the concomitant emergence processes are ignored, the physicalism/spiritualism dilemma remains unsolved, whereas if they are included, the alleged mysteries are shown to be problems that science is treating successfully.

Author: Manabendra Nath Roy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lokāyata
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Author: F.A. Lange
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317829913
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1133

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This is Volume I of five in a series on Epistemology and Metaphysics. Originally published in 1865, this book offers the history of materialism and a criticism of its present importance in that period of time, presented in three parts.

Author: Peter R. Anstey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192843729
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
A Materialist Theory of Mind (1968) by David Armstrong is one of a handful of texts that began the physicalist revolution in the philosophy of mind. It is perhaps the most influential book in the field of the second half of the twentieth century. In this volume a distinguished international team of philosophers examine what we still owe to Armstrong's theory, and how to expand it, as well as looking back on how it came about. The first four chapters are historical in orientation, exploring how the book fits into the history of materialism in the twentieth century. The chapters that follow discuss perception, belief, the supposed explanatory gap between the physical and the mental, introspection, conation, causality, and functionalism.

Author: William McDougall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317275101
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Originally published in 1929, McDougall examines the pertinent conflict between religion and science. His work exhibits the failure of scientists to explain human action mechanistically (the essence of modern materialism), establishes purposive action as a type of event radically different from all mechanistic events, and justifies the belief in teleological causation without which there can be neither religion nor morals. This title will be of interest to students of both the Humanities and Sciences, particularly those studying psychology and philosophy.

Author: Bernardo Kastrup
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1782793615
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. ,