Books: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False: Can Sentience be Explained by Substance?

摘要

Nagel Thomas Oxford University Press, US, 2012 , HB, 144 pp, ￡20.49, 978-0199919758GPs implicitly treat their contact with patients as the meeting of conscious minds. What fewer may acknowledge is that this view may be rationally incompatible with notions of humans as products of a pure material evolution.If Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, is correct then general practice, and the biological sciences in general, have been reading the story of life back to front. Nagel’s claim is that consciousness is an integral property of the universe, and the material nature of the universe is there to support this property. This claim, that sentience cannot be explained by substance and that evolution in some way contains a directional arrow, is not unique to Nagel, but it is an unusual assertion …