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Joseph Margolis: Persons and Minds: The Prospects of Nonreductive materialism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Paul M. Churchland
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba

Extract

As the sixteenth Century drew to a close, the human race teetered at the brink of an unprecedented intellectual revolution. The Aristotelean conception of a small, spherical, Earth-centered cosmos ceased to confine the imagination of an increasing number of thinkers; the recently proposed Copernican system, problematic though it was, sketched a provocative alternative with some real explanatory advantages (e.g., its uniform explanation of the existence, amount, and timing of retrograde motions); and distinct intellectual currents converged in the growing search for a new dynamics that would encompass at once all motion, superlunary and sublunary. In the event, the cosmology, the planetary astronomy, and the dynamics finally came together in Newton's uniquely coherent synthesis, and by the dawn of the eighteenth century we had exchanged the dubious comfort of Aristotle's enveloping egg for the more chilling contemplation of a spatially infinite universe.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1980

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References

Notes

1 The Fabric of the Heavens, Toulmin, S. and Goodfield, J. (Penguin, 1961), p. 205.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Hooker, C.A., “Towards a General Theory of Reduction” (forthcoming, this journal); or Churchland, P.M., Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge, 1979), §11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar