Abstract
Thinking is an emergent property that issues from a brain. The brain is the material matrix of thought. Thought itself is material, although it is an incredibly subtle form of matter-energy. We extended the metaphor of the brain in the last chapter to encompass all forms of self-organization; however, the animal brain is the most complex phenomenon we know. The brain is an extraordinarily complex, self-organized structure that generates emotions, consciousness, feeling, and thinking. In an evolutionary sense, this incredible complexity is partly derived from the predatory nature of the animal, which cannot directly convert solar energy into efficient work, but must hunt, gather, herd, or grow other forms of animal and plant life to consume the carbohydrates stored within them that originate with bacteria that then enable plant photosynthesis.
Who’s afraid of philosophy?
—Jacques Derrida, Right to Philosophy 1
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Notes
See Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 196
Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001)
See Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996).
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 5.
See David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), Section VIII.
Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 63.
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 2003), p. 53.
Of course, there is still a phenomenological gap between the lack of direct experience of our brains and our neurons in our subjective consciousness, and the physical state of the brain as revealed to our understanding by neurology. Slavoj Žižek in The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. G. R. G. Mure in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1992), p. 29.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 41.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 2, 4 (emphasis in original).
See A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, ed. Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
See Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 201.
See Creston Davis, “Introduction,” in Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, ed. by Creston Davis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
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© 2012 Clayton Crockett & Jeffrey W. Robbins
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Crockett, C., Robbins, J.W. (2012). Logic. In: Religion, Politics, and the Earth. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268938_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268938_9
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