How long does it take to read Mind and Cosmos?
Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel takes about 2 hours 34 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 34 minutes
An evening's read
First published 2012. 140 pages, about 38,500 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 17 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 34 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 36 minutes |
The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.--Publisher description.
Subjects: Cosmogony, Philosophy, Science, Creation, Beginning, Cosmology
