Abstract
The present Congress is focused on the phenomenology of life in a broad sense, and thus presupposes the reality of life, and consequently its origin in a given moment in the development of the cosmos.
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Notes
J. Monod, Le hasard et la nécessité, Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne (Paris, 1970), pref., pp. 12–13.
L. E. Orgel, The Origins of Life (London, 1973), p. 193.
Monod, op. cit., pp. 127–128.
Ibid., p. 110.
A. A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondaments de nos connaissances, 9th ed. (Paris, 1912), p. 40.
For the demonstration of the principle of contradiction in Aristotle, cfr. M. Casula, “La prova aristotelica del principio di contraddizione dal linguaggio,” Giornale di Metafisica 1970: nos. 5–6, pp. 641–673.
Nous devons donc envisager l’état présent de l’univers, comme l’effet de son état antérieur, et comme la cause de celui que va suivre. Une intelligence qui pour un instant donné, connaitrait toutes les forces dont la nature est animée, et la situation respective des êtres que la composent, si d’ailleurs elle était assez vaste pour soumettre ces données à l’analyse, embrasserait dans la même formule, les mouvements des plus grands corps de l’univers et ceux du plus léger atome: rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l’avenir comme le passé, serait présent à ses yeux“ (P.-S. de Laplace, Thèorie analytique des probabilités, III ed. (Paris, 1820), introd., p. iJ — a famous text, most difficult to find).
“En langage mathématique, le déterminisme s’exprime en disant que les phénomènes de la Nature sont régis par des équations differentielles dont les solutions sont entièrement determinées quand on connait leurs valeurs et celles de certaines derivées à un certain instant initial. Par exemple, le mouvement d’un point matériel dans un champ de force donnée est entièrement connu quand on connait sa position initiale et sa vitesse initiale” (L. de Broglie, “Determinisme et causalité dans la physique contemporaine,” in: Revue de Mètaphysique et Morale XXXVI, No. 4 (1929), pp. 433–443. The text continues citing Laplace to the letter).
A very common exposition. Cfr., e.g., H. Friztsch, Quarks (Munich, 1981), pp. 18–22, which sees in the principle an objective limit to our knowledge, and M. Bungo, “The Interpretation of Heisenberg’s Inequalities,” in Denken und Umdenken (ed. H. Pfeiffer), (Munich, 1988), pp. 146–156. Moreover the confusion between the principle of causality and that of determinism is due to Heisenberg himself, too (cfr. his famous essay, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” in Zeitschrift für Physik 43 (1927), pp. 172–198, expl. p. 197).
Cfr. Laplace, op. cit., ibid.; Cournot, op. cit., pp. 40–42, 46–48.
A doctor is called for an urgent visit to a patient and enters while a worker is repairing the roof: when the doctor passes under the building the worker drops a big hammer which hits the doctor in the head and kills him (Monod, op. cit., p. 128).
M. Midgley, Science as Salvation, (London, 1992), pp. 43–50.
Just so Monod still —. op. cit., pp. 140, 112.
G. Wald, The Origin of Life, in Scientific American 19 (August 1954), p. 46c (letters after the page number indicate the column).
Ibid., p. 47b.
Ibid., p. 46c.
Ibid., p. 47a.
Ibid., p. 47c.
“Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the ”impossible“ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles” (ibid., p. 48a).
Monod, op. cit., p. 160.
“L’Univers n’etait pas gros de la vie, ni la biosphère de l’homme. Notre numéro est sorti au jeu de Monte-Carlo” (ibid., p. 161).
Ibid., p. 161.
Chr. de Duve, Aus der Staub geboren,German translation (Heidelberg, 1995), p. 36, (English original: Vital Dust. Life as Cosmic Imperative [New York, 1995]).
Ibid., e.g., p. 50 (given, not conceded: whence comes life in the other world?).
Ibid., pp. 35–36.
S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York, 1988), p. 123.
G. Schroeder, Schöpfung und Urknall, German translation (Munich, 1993), pp. 244–245 (English original: Genesis and the Big Bang [New York, 1990]).
K. Stierstadt, Physik der Materie (Weinheim, 1989), p. 453: this value concerns the universe the light which has reached us and would be about 1/10 of the real volume.
H. J. Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology (Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1979), pp. 12, 65. This is one of the best biophysical studies on the subject, much stimulated, as the preface affirms, by E. Schrödinger’s What Is Life? (Cambridge, 1944).
Ibid., p. 12.
J. Guitton, Gott und die Wissenschaft, German translation (Munich, 1992), p. 61 (French original: Dieu et la science [Paris, 1991]).
Schroeder, op. cit., p. 153.
See Morowitz, op. cit., pp. 5ff. for the Gedankenexperiment (this very well-known German term is his), in which the value of the probability indicated is on p. 7 and the considerations on the number that render it “vanishingly small” on pp. 11–12. Cfr. also ibid., pp. 64ff.
De aeternitate mundi (contra murmurantes), in St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia (ed. Leonina), Vol. XLIII, (Rome, 1976), pp. 88–89. As for Aristotle, cfr. Metaphysics, e.g., XIII, 6, 1072a, and ibid. 8, 1073a.
Monod, op. cit., p. 32.
J. Rennie “In the Beginning: Evidence Grows the RNA Was the First Self-made Molecule,” Scientific American 261 (Sept. 1989), pp. 13–16; L. E. Orgel, “The Origin of Life on the Earth,” in Scientific American 271 (Oct. 1994), pp. 53–61; Th. R. Cech, “RNA as an Enzyme,” in Scientific American 255 (Nov. 1986), pp. 76–84.
Schroeder, op. cit., p. 152.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q.2.a.3.c.
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Casula, M. (1999). The Problem of the Origin of Life by Chance. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Life Scientific Philosophy, Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 59. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2079-3_4
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