Bücher von Jonathan Chapman

The arguments of this essay cover three broadly related topics. The first is concerned with ontological thinking as it has evolved over the last 900 years under the pressure of scientific and technological development.This historical sketch provides the background and context for a re-examination, in the second part, of the nature of conceptual thinking, intuition, the role of heuristic modelling, the function of language, and the fallibility of the human mind, and, in the third, of the interiority of human experience, subjectivity, self-awareness, personal identity, jeopardy, autonomy, and freedom.By re-analyzing these concepts, we can hope to create better maps of the complex inter-dependencies between the structures of conceptual thinking and the experience of an inner life that determine the human condition.

How can we integrate the scientific image of the world with our own experience of existence, without compromising either?How can the macro-scale events of cosmology, biological evolution and cultural acquisition, which are evolving through time and have a history and a memory, be the same thing as the micro-scale events described by physics and chemistry, which remain constant, without either history or memory?For philosophical monism to be plausible, systems at different scales must have different ordering principles. There must be asymmetries between them, so that the evolving systems at the macro-scale can co-exist with the constant systems at the micro-scale.