The Bilateral Mind as the Mirror of Nature: A Metaphilosophy

ISBN-13: 9783031144776 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 348 str.

James Blachowicz

Opis

This book provides a framework that encompasses both physics and cognitive science – integrating them into a ‘theory of everything’ to establish a basis for both our scientific and humanistic endeavours.It explores the implications of brain laterality for understanding the emergence of mind and its relation to the physical world – arguing that the analytic vs. holistic cognitive differences of the left and right human cerebral hemispheres are key to understanding not only human self-consciousness and language, but also sociocultural phenomena ranging from the emergence of the scientific method and axes of political orientation to the direction of development of conceptions of God and the fundamental differences between polarizing philosophical traditions.
In a further step, the book draws on the Darwinian principle that our cognitive apparatus is shaped by the environment in which it evolved to argue that human bilaterality mirrors the fundamental hylomorphic relation between formal organization and material components that constitutes physical nature itself. The logical division between holistic and analytic categories thereby offers a principled basis for a metaphilosophy.

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction: Analysis and Holism

Part I: METAPHYSICS

Chapter 2: Reductionism and Emergence

Chapter 3: Purely Physical Emergence

Chapter 4: Protective Enclosures and the Emergence of Life

Chapter 5 :Virtual Reality and the Emergence of Mind

Chapter 6: Physics and Theology: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

PART II: EPISTEMOLOGY

Chapter 7: Inter-Hemispheric Dialogue

Chapter 8: One Method for All Inquiry

PART III: MORAL and POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 9: Morality and the Rational Control of Desire

Chapter 10: Freud and the Physics of Civilization

Chapter 11: Hemispheric Politics

PART IV: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION and NATURAL THEOLOGY

Chapter 12: Archaic and Modern Religious Ontologies

Chapter 13: An Empty Holy of Holies

PART V: ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 14: Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy

O autorze

James Blachowicz is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago.

Blurb

This book provides a framework that encompasses both physics and cognitive science – integrating them into a ‘theory of everything’ to establish a basis for both our scientific and humanistic endeavours.

It explores the implications of brain laterality for understanding the emergence of mind and its relation to the physical world – arguing that the analytic vs. holistic cognitive differences of the left and right human cerebral hemispheres are key to understanding not only human self-consciousness and language, but also sociocultural phenomena ranging from the emergence of the scientific method and axes of political orientation to the direction of development of conceptions of God and the fundamental differences between polarizing philosophical traditions.

In a further step, the book draws on the Darwinian principle that our cognitive apparatus is shaped by the environment in which it evolved to argue that human bilaterality mirrors the fundamental hylomorphic relation between formal organization and material components that constitutes physical nature itself. The logical division between holistic and analytic categories thereby offers a principled basis for a metaphilosophy.

James Blachowicz is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.