¶ Animate and Inanimate Sequence
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Index Entry
Animate and Inanimate Sequence:
"Today’s hyperspecialization in socio-economic functioning has come to preclude important popular philosophic considerations of the synergetic significance of, for instance, such historically important events as the discovery within the general region of experimental inquiry known as virology, that the as-yet popularly assumed validity of the concept animate and inanimate phenomena have been experimentally invalidated.
"Atoms and crystal complexes of atoms were held to be obviously inanimate. The protoplasmic cells of biological phenomena were held to be obviously animate. It was deemed to be common sense that warm-blooded, moist, and soft-skinned humans were clearly not to be confused with (cold hard) granite or steel objects. A clear-cut threshold between animate and inanimate was therefore assumed to exist as a fundamental dichotomy of all physical phenomena. This seemingly placed life exclusively within the bounds of the physical.
“The supposed location of the threshold between the animate and inanimate was methodically narrowed down by experimental science until it was confined specifically within the domain of virology.”
