Introduction

pp. 1-22

in: Joseph Mendola, Human thought, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

Worms, dogs, and bats, if they think anything, cannot think about evolutionary biology and quantum mechanics. I believe that we humans are also bound by our form, a form due to some mixture of evolutionary pressure and chance.¹ There are significant limits to what we can think, rooted in the limits of our capacity for experience. And the limits of our capacity for experience are themselves rooted in the very contingent form of our sense organs, our muscles and limbs, and the neurophysiology which links them. These limits place significant restrictions on our ability to understand how we think what we do² and the nature of the world.³