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Natural Teleology: Thomas Nagel’s Critique of the Materialist Worldview
Thomas Nagel, Emeritus Professor at NYU, presents a philosophical position that challenges the completeness of the current scientific worldview. In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that the standard materialist model of nature—the one holding that life and mind are accidental byproducts of physical laws—is logically insufficient. His work is not a defense…
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The World as a Thought: George Berkeley, James Tartaglia, and the Idealist Reversal
When we began this series seven weeks ago with Alfred North Whitehead, we started with a radical rejection of “dead matter.” Whitehead famously argued that both traditional materialism and idealism suffer from the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”—the mistake of treating abstract concepts like “matter” or “mind” as if they were the fundamental, concrete reality. To…
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The Ghost in the Machine: Richard Swinburne and the Case for the Soul
Over the last few weeks, we have navigated the busy streets of physicalism. We saw Daniel Dennett argue that the mind is a clever trick of the brain—a “user-illusion.” We saw Galen Strawson argue for a “Real Physicalism,” suggesting that matter itself is inherently conscious. Despite their differences, they both shared a common boundary: they…