The Metamorphoses of Philosophy I: An Account of Cognitive Emergence in Philosophy and Science
Ranging from ancient mythography to the present-day, and covering a period of 3000 years, this book provides a phenomenology of the Western mind. It examines the emergence of philosophical ideas within the context of the cross-pollination among the perceptual, cognitive, cultural and value orders. As such, it argues against a naturalist, reductivist approach, which pays insufficient attention to the social dimensions of emergence, while simultaneously reclaiming the idea of cognitive emergence for philosophy, as well as science. Its scope is wide, and includes considerable references to all cultural aspects of relevance to philosophy. Its conversational style will appeal to philosophers and graduates, historians of ideas and science, and to all readers with a deep interest in the culture of western philosophy.
This volume, the first of three, explores the origins of philosophy up to its first high-water mark in ancient Greece, including a brief study in contrasts with classical Chinese philosophy.
Jürgen Lawrenz gained his doctorate in Philosophy from Sydney University, where he lectured on Early Modern Philosophy. He has published in the areas of Greek and German philosophy, aesthetics, music and the history of ideas.
“I was struck (verging upon ‘overwhelmed’) by the scope and depth of this book. If I were in the position of approaching the final undergraduate year of a philosophy degree, or embarking on research in philosophy—especially if my interests included or even overlapped slightly with phenomenology—I’d want to study it in depth. The approach is idiosyncratic, but that’s true of every major work in philosophy, [but] it’s not tendentious. It gives the reader with basic knowledge an in-depth grasp of the history of philosophy and its relationship to wider culture from the dawn of European civilisation to the present day, and I know of no other book that achieves that in comparable depth. It’s a distillation of a lifetime’s dedication to the study of philosophy.”
P. S. Agutter
Director, Theoretical Medicine and Biology Group, Glossop, UK; editor-in-chief of Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling; author of About Life and Thinking About Life
“This book is majestic in its ambition, scale, scope and erudition. It bristles with insights and is the result of a life time of philosophical thinking.”
Wayne Cristaudo
Professor in Political Science, Charles Darwin University, Australia
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