Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenology of the Noosphere

Hub Zwart*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter/Conference proceedingChapterAcademic

2 Citations (Scopus)
75 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Although Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was thoroughly trained in philosophy and theology, he was first and foremost a paleoanthropologist, directly involved in the discovery of Homo erectus pekinensis (“Sinanthropus”) in China in the 1920s and 1930s. He came from a Catholic aristocratic background, was ordained a priest in 1911, survived World War I (as a stretcher-bearer, distinguished with the Legion of Honour), joined the Jesuit Order, conducted paleoanthropological field work during the interbellum, and became entangled in a conflict with his Jesuit superiors (over pantheism and the concept of original sin) until his death in New York (in exile more or less). When his writings were published (shortly after his death, as his superiors forbade publication during his lifetime), he quickly became an intellectual celebrity. Currently, he is credited with having anticipated Gaia theory (King, 2006), the global village concept (McLuhan, 1962), the Internet (Barlow, 1992; Cobb, 1998), the WWW (Garreau, 2005, p. 256; Greenfield, 2014, p. 9), transhumanism (Delio, 2014; Steinhart, 2008), the “global brain” (Stock, 1993), and the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2011).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPhilosophy of Engineering and Technology
PublisherSpringer Nature
Chapter7
Pages207-227
Number of pages21
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Publication series

SeriesPhilosophy of Engineering and Technology
Volume38
ISSN1879-7202

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).

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