Teilhard's Vision of the Past

The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has been characterized as metaphysics poetry and mysticism-virtually everything except what its author claimed it was: a purely scientific mémoir. Professor O'Connell here follows up on a nest of clues uncovered first in an early unpublished essay then in the series of essays contained principally in The Vision of the Past. Those clues all point to Teilhard's intimate familiarity with the philosophy of science propounded by the celebrated Pierre Duhem. It was Duhem's central claim that science to remain true to itself must aim at establishing a genuine natural classification phenomenal reality. That insight Professor O'Connell argues guided Teilhard's lifelong effort to describe the imposed reality-factors which science in its variety of forms suggests as ingredients and operative at every phase in the evolutionary development of planet Earth. Limiting his focus to the way Teilhard unfolded his vision of the past Professor O'Connell concludes that those who deprecate Teilhard as unscientific betray little awareness of how sophisticated his understanding of science truly was.