Sentences with phrase «classical cosmography»

Not exact matches

Along with dualistic mythology several developments in scientific thought since the seventeenth century have contributed to the exorcism of mind from nature: first, there is the cosmography of classical (Newtonian) physics picturing our world as composed of inanimate, unconscious bits of «matter» needing only the brute laws of inertia to explain their action; second, the Darwinian theory of evolution with its emphasis on chance, waste and the apparent «impersonality» of natural selection; third, the laws of thermodynamics (and particularly the second law) with the allied cosmological interpretation that our universe is running out of energy available to sustain life, evolution and human consciousness; fourth, the geological and astronomical disclosure of enormous tracts of apparently lifeless space and matter in the universe; fifth, the recent suggestions that life may be reducible to an inanimate chemical basis; and, finally, perhaps most shocking of all, the suspicion that mind may be explained exhaustively in terms of mindless brain chemistry.