7 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Media type Print ISBN 978-0-19-991975-8 Publisher Oxford University Press | 3.5/5 Goodreads Publication date September 2012 Pages 130 Originally published September 2012 Page count 130 Subject Consciousness | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Thomas Nagel books, Consciousness books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Analysis of thomas nagel s mind and cosmos alexander fink
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False is a 2012 book by Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy at New York University.
Contents
Summary
In the book, Nagel argues that the materialist version of evolutionary biology is unable to account for the existence of mind and consciousness, and, therefore, is, at best, incomplete. He writes that mind is a basic aspect of nature, and that any philosophy of nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally misguided. He argues that the standard physico-chemical reductionist account of the emergence of life – that it emerged from a series of accidents, acted upon by the mechanism of natural selection — flies in the face of common sense.
Nagel's position is that principles of an entirely different kind may account for the emergence of life, and in particular conscious life, and that those principles may be teleological, rather than materialist or mechanistic. He stresses that his argument is not a religious one (he is an atheist), and that it is not based on the theory of intelligent design (ID), though he also writes that ID proponents such as Michael Behe, Stephen C. Meyer, and David Berlinski do not deserve the scorn with which their ideas have been met by the overwhelming majority of the scientific establishment.