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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit paleontologist who died
in 1955, is little discussed today. But in the '60s, especially with the backdrop
of the ecology movement and recognition of 'spaceship earth' and 'earth as a biosphere,'
his often mystic ruminations, at least in Catholic colleges in the U.S., were
commonly considered.
His theory was that man is evolving, mentally and socially, toward a final
spiritual unity. Blending science and Christianity, he declared that the human
epic resembles "nothing so much as a way of the Cross." Following
his cogitations involved various philosophical leaps, which his religious superiors
were not entirely comfortable with. All his major works, including The Phenomenon
of Man, were published posthumously [per Britannica.com].
De Chardin's apparent decline in general estimation (though it is too early
in the vortex of time to tell his final estimation), can in part be laid to
questions on his scientism, not the least of which was his purported role in
the Piltdown Man fossil hoax. While he likely did not play a role as an instigator
of the hoax according to good research, the indications that he was taken in
by it, and questions of his scientific rigor, helped place his star in decline
for now.
He played a fundamental role in proposing the theory of a noosphere, or global
or historical mind, that is on the level of the intellect, as opposed to the
geosphere, or nonliving world, and the biosphere, or living world. The Web seems
to have some characteristics of the noosphere as proposed by de Chardin
On
Piltown on De Chardin
Phenomona
of man on Amazon
Teilhard Google Search
© Copyright 2003 Jack Vaughan.
Last update: 4/12/2003; 11:47:27 AM.
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