Interpretation of Science

The concept of individuation is at the base of a conceptual structure that runs from agency through autonomy and liberty to the idea of the state, law and political legitimacy.These concepts belong to the Geisteswissenschaften, (there isn’t a properly equivalent term in English), the intellectual disciplines concerned with intellectual and cultural entities and events, rather than the Naturwissenschaften, the intellectual disciplines, the natural sciences, that are concerned with natural entities and events.However, the form in which agency, and everything which follows from agency, is attributable to human beings is where the development has arrived but not where it began.The idea…

The sections below are taken from the slides I used for a talk at the Alliance Francaise de Penang in December 2019. I am grateful to the director and team at the AF for the opportunity to make this presentation. The fundamental question We have at least two different pictures of the cosmos and no obvious means of integrating them. We have no intuitive understanding of the micro-scale of physics and chemistry, only a set of mathematical models. But, at the same time, those mathematical models have nothing to say about the familiar world of our own experience of being…

In his book Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel suggests neutral monism as a potentially better way of understanding the relation of the mind to the physical world than the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism and dualism.However, as Peter Godfrey-Smith pointed out in his review in the London Review of Books, Nagel has in mind here an interpretation of the idea of neutral monism that would:Explain the appearance of mental life at complex levels of biological organization by means of a general monism according to which the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its physical but also…