Changing relations to the cosmos
Mary Midgley
August 2, 2023 DOI: 10.4324/9781003411710-2 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Commentary |
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| Key points | Argues, following Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, that a cosmos containing conscious, thinking beings must be so different from one without them that it cannot be described in the same terms, challenging the dominant academic view that physical science is central and mind merely peripheral. The author also recounts behaviourist psychologists' early twentieth-century campaign to remove consciousness from academic consideration. |
Abstract
Questions about subjectivity – about the soul or spirit – did not seriously arise until the start of the twentieth century. At that time behaviourist psychologists suddenly ruled that consciousness must be banished from academic consideration altogether because it was unscientific. They campaigned vigorously to solve the mind–body problem by removing the mind. Thomas Nagel’s proposal calls in question some ideas that have long formed an unstated dominant credo among academics, ideas that display physical science as a kind of sun at the centre of the intellectual cosmos and mind as just an inconvenient peripheral planet that may, with luck, finally be excluded from that system altogether. Nagel’s main message in Mind and Cosmos is that a cosmos that contains conscious, thinking beings like ourselves must be different from one that does not contain them – so different that it cannot be described in the same terms.