Book Bearings
The Phenomenon of Man
- 320 pages · about 5 hours
- First published 1955
- 28 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
The Phenomenon of Man (French: Le phénomène humain) is an essay by the French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. The text was written in the 1930s, but it achieved publication only posthumously, in 1955.
In depth, the work seeks to unify multiple scientific fields, as per the author's multidisciplinary approach in his own career, with the principles of religion and broader human understandings of existence into a coherent whole. Centering upon biological evolution, Chardin articulates a vision of the universe itself as gradually increasing in complexity and unity from early chaos into ever greater oneness.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Good for readers who want: evolution, philosophy, and astronomy.
- Evolution
- Philosophy
- Anthropology
- Philosophical anthropology
- Biological Evolution
- Human evolution
- Cosmology
- Human beings
2 About Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3 Similar books
- How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
- On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
- The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
- What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell by Erwin Schrödinger
- The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
- The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
- The Big Picture by Sean M. Carroll