Emergance and Evolutionary Philosophy

Booklist

The following list of contains books that I gave used as background reading to understand the development of philosophical thinking, current understanding and the definition of technical terms. It also contains works where important parts of evolutionary philosophy are to my mind revealed. These are used as references elsewhere in these pages

This is a well-illustrated coffee table history of philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Popper in the 1970s allowing a page or two for all of the great names it presents them in historical order and contemporary context.

I have used this as my basic primer on the development of philosophical thinking. I can thoroughly recommend it for this purpose. I found the illustrations most revealing and appreciate that great thought went into choosing them and hope some time to discuss these in the context of the use of symbols in evolutionary philosophy

I wished to read an overall review of modern philosophical thinking to get at least some background on the subject and chose this one from the offerings available from a good bookshop. It is reasonably easy to read and I can recommend it for supplying precisely what I wanted at the time.

I propose to use the contents page of this book to run through how my evolutionary philosophy ideas interact with what is probably quite a complete review of philosophical topics and try to ensure that my thinking is not confined to some critical areas of interest and/or perceived importance. This should put what I am trying to say into a reasonable context with others work.

At this stage in the process I do not wish to study other current philosophy too deeply to avoid excessively colouring my own ideas. I feel that sometimes it is possible to have studied a topic too deeply to allow personal original thought so please forgive elements of naivety in some areas.

This is a useful dictionary that I have used to look up the regular definitions of words in a philosophical context

This is an extension of James Lovelock's original work on the evolutionary based negative feedback basis of the stabilisation of conditions for life on earth as described in "Gaia: A new look at life on Earth" and extends his simple "Daisyworld" models.

Overall a good read illustrating the development of co-operation out of competition in basic evolution.

This describes a concept of the Evolutionary origins of the universe we inhabit by the selction of universes that maximise the production of black holes. A black hole is by definition the start of another universe in the complex "multiverse" most of which is forever inaccessible to human investigation. This is a very contageous idea. The important feature is that it has been originated by a respected leader in the area of mathematical cosmology.

It is quite interesting how the concept of "Evolutionary Philosophy" is growing, because when I first coined the phrase a few years ago I was unable to find any references using that set of words in several full web searches using all the search engines I knew at the time. I did this to check out if the phrase had also been used by others to mean something different from what I would like it to mean initially and assumed that I therefore had an open field to describe it the way I wanted. Like any concept though once aired it has a life of its own and will evolve in its own right irrespective of my feelings! I am of a strong opinion that it is an idea that has reached its time and could have a big effect on thinking in the next decade or two.