Although the authors state that “living systems are cognitive systems...

Although the authors state that “living systems are cognitive systems, and Living as a process is a process of cognition” (p.13), this living nervous-system based approach to ‘knowing’ does not take us much beyond Aristotle’s entelechial view of the soul as merely an organic by-product of the living organism, which led him to deny the survival of soul after the decease of the body. Further, see our remarks below on the philosophy of ‘mind’.

[^8]- Heinz Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and the End of the Middle Ages, translated R.J. Betanzos (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1994; German original published 1922) p.[^31]: Heimsoeth’s statement is merely part of his characterization of the conventional view concerning the transition to modernity that he intended to revise.

His work sought to undermine the validity of trying to “distinguish modern philosophy, as purely secular and directed toward nature and natural existence, from medieval philosophy, which always inquired about ultimate supernatural things, about God, immortality, and the soul. Separating philosophy as autonomous science and secular wisdom from theology is absolutely not the same thing as separating their contents from the sources and the great questions of religious life” (ibid, 32).

[^9]- See for example Mortimer J. Adler, Intellect: Mind Over Matter (New York, Macmillan, 1990); Gregory McCulloch, The Mind and Its World (London, Routledge, 1995); and the work of H. Feigl cited above. [^10]- Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind, (2nd ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1997) [^39]: [^11]- Sergio Moravia, The Enigma of the Mind: The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Thought, trans. S. Staton (Cambridge University Press, 1995; 1st pub.

Rome 1986) 4–[^5]: We should recall that in (dualist) Cartesian terms the ‘mind’ is purely spiritual and radically non-spatial as a conscious immaterial substance; this was basically the preferred definition of the intellect among Muslim philosophers and the later theologians after al-Ghaza>li> (al-‘aqlu jawharun basi>t}un qa>’im bi-nafsihi). [^12]- See the informative overview of the main historical-theoretical tendencies by S. Moravia, The Enigma of the Mind.

[^13]- As a sampling, we should mention foremost the studies by Robert J. Sternberg rethinking the nature of intelligence from philosophical, folk, and psychodevelopmental perspectives; eg.