An examination of ancient astronomy looks at the myths and beliefs about the heavens that influenced everyday life in these primitive cultures

An introduction to the life and work of Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662), focusing on his thought concerning the cosmos, the nature of man and his relationship with God, christology, the liturgical and sacramental dimension, history and eschatology.

Explores the relationship between the mystical cosmology of G. I. Gurdjieff and the discoveries and theories of modern science.

This book is devoted to a full and lucid exposition of Boyde's ideas. In the first two parts, the author presents a systematic account of the universe as Dante accepted it, and explains the processes of 'creation' and 'generation' as they operate in the non-human parts of the cosmos. Dr Boyde then shows how the two processes combine in Dante's theory of human embryology, and how this combination affects the issues of love, choice and freedom. The third and last part of the book consolidates these expository sections with a generous selection of quotations from Dante's authorities and from his own works in prose. At the same time, the book offers far more than a clear account of Dante's cosmology and anthropology. Dr Boyde is interested in Dante's ideas in so far as they inspired and gave shape to the Divine Comedy. Furthermore, in every chapter he demonstrates how the relevant concepts and habits of thought were transmuted into imagery, symbolism, and dramatic scenes, or simply transformed by the energy and concision of Dante's poetic style.

“A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.

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.