Mind and Cosmos

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

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Book Description
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.

Mind and Cosmos

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

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Book Description
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.

Evolution and Belief

Evolution and Belief PDF Author: Robert J. Asher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521193834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Asher draws on his experiences as a paleontologist and a religious believer, arguing that science does not contradict religious belief.

Medieval Modern

Medieval Modern PDF Author: Alexander Nagel
Publisher: Thames and Hudson
ISBN: 9780500238974
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Rich collisions and fresh perspectives illuminate the profound continuities of thought and practice that have marked Western art through the ages This groundbreaking study offers a radical new reading of art since the Middle Ages. Moving across the familiar period lines set out in conventional histories, Alexander Nagel explores the deep connections between modern and premodern art to reveal the underlying patterns and ideas traversing centuries of artistic practice. In a series of episodic chapters, he reconsiders from an innovative double perspective a number of key issues in the history of art, from iconoclasm and idolatry to installation and the museum as institution. He shows how the central tenets of modernism – serial production, site-specificity, collage, the readymade, and the questioning of the nature of art and authorship – were all features of earlier times before modernity, revived by recent generations. Nagel examines, among other things, the importance of medieval cathedrals to the 1920s Bauhaus movement, the parallels between Renaissance altarpieces and modern preoccupations with surface and structure; the relevance of Byzantine models to Minimalist artists; the affinities between ancient holy sites and early earthworks; and the similarities between the sacred relic and the modern readymade. Alongside the work of leading 20th-century medievalist writes such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Leo Steinberg, and Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Smithson, and Damien Hirst. The effect of these encounters goes in two directions at once: each age offers new insights into the other, deepening our understanding of both past and present, and providing a new set of reference points that reframe the history of art itself.

Anachronic Renaissance

Anachronic Renaissance PDF Author: Alexander Nagel
Publisher: Zone Books
ISBN: 1942130341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists—a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be Early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or “image made without hands”), the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. Although a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories.

A Sense of Wonder

A Sense of Wonder PDF Author: Craig Nagel
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1468541978
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Reading the essays of Craig Nagel is like enjoying a good, unhurried visit with a good friend, one who is thoughtful, insightful and articulatethe welcome companion whos good to have around and to be around. Hes fun. Nagel simply exudes charm and common senseand he writes so well. (Hes a gentle philosopher of the commonplace.) Hes also organized. His brief sketches flow so nicely together. Just perusing his prefacewell, theres none like it!will convince all thinking readers theyre in for a real treat. And they are: hes that good. Dr. Art Lee Prof. of History (ret.) Bemidji State University

Mortal Questions (Canto Classics)

Mortal Questions (Canto Classics) PDF Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107604710
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Preface Sources 1 Death 2 The absurd 3 Moral luck 4 Sexual perversion 5 War and massacre 6 Ruthlessness in public life 7 The policy of preference 8 Equality 9 The fragmentation of value 10 Ethics without biology 11 Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness 12 What is it like to be a bat? 13 Panpsychism 14 Subjective and objective Index.

Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz PDF Author: Elizabeth Prelinger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300061684
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
The German printmaker, draughtsman, and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz's images of mothers and children and of protest against social injustice have long been admired by both critics and the public. Kollwitz adhered to a figurative style in the era of abstraction and she depicted socially-engaged subject matter when it was unfashionable. Critics have often focused on those issues and have rarely studied the ways in which the artist manipulated technique and resolved formal problems. This illustrated book redresses this imbalance, portraying Kollwitz as an innovative and virtuosic artist rather than a mere chronicler of particular themes.

The Last Word

The Last Word PDF Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882118
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view--principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct. But this generality of reason is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers. And such subjectivism is not just an inconsequential intellectual flourish or badge of theoretical chic. It is exploited to deflect argument and to belittle the pretensions of the arguments of others. The continuing spread of this relativistic way of thinking threatens to make public discourse increasingly difficult and to exacerbate the deep divisions of our society. In The Last Word, Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential philosophers writing in English, presents a sustained defense of reason against the attacks of subjectivism, delivering systematic rebuttals of relativistic claims with respect to language, logic, science, and ethics. He shows that the last word in disputes about the objective validity of any form of thought must lie in some unqualified thoughts about how things are--thoughts that we cannot regard from outside as mere psychological dispositions.

Duplex

Duplex PDF Author: Mike Nagel
Publisher: Autofocus Books
ISBN: 9781957392004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
Mike Nagel is spending too much time in his duplex. Mostly he's hungover. There's a squirrel in the attic, the ceiling's caving in, and he's not sure who to call about it. Not much else seems to happen in Mike Nagel's Duplex, except of course everything happens there: a distinct mind is constantly working over the absurdity, meaninglessness, and mundanity of contemporary life in ways both laugh-out-loud funny and thoughtfully compelling.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway PDF Author: James Nagel
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817308423
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The first extensive study of Hemingway's relationship to his hometown, Oak Park, Illinois, and the influence its people, places, and underlying values had on his early work."Fresh and insightful essays provide extended and focused discussion of issues central to Hemingway's literary identity". -- Susan Beegel, The Hemingway Review