Nature - Nature Before Literacy, Nature In Antiquity, Pre-socratic Ideas Of Nature, Nature In Greek Rationalism
interpretive twentieth evolved darwin
No interpretation of the idea of nature is good for all people in all places at all times. The interpretive position here reflects pivotal conceptual developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Charles Darwin's century brought home forcefully the reality of time, of evolutionary process that ultimately transforms all things. Darwin's contemporary T. H. Huxley believed that evolution forced the question of our place in nature upon us. Twentieth-century science posed a further interpretive challenge. We have reached the end of credible claims to certainty concerning nature. Given uncertainty, open-ended inquiry becomes the hallmark of rationality, and the idea of nature remains inevitably in flux. A third interpretive factor emerges at the intersection of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The present cultural trajectory is on a collision course with the evolved biophysical scheme. The interpretive challenge is to account for the predicament of a naturally evolved species whose cultural evolution has led to maladaptive ideas of nature that must be transformed in order to avert biophysical catastrophe.
Additional Topics
Arguably, the nineteenth-century discovery of the Paleolithic, the period of human development stretching from about two million to about ten thousand years ago, is exceeded in significance only by the discovery of biological evolution. Ensconced within cultural cocoons of literacy and technology, we believe that paleo-people were stupid savages since they were not literate and possessed only rudi…
Antiquity is defined here as a zone of cultural transition at the boundary between the Old and the New Stone Age, the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Climate change is increasingly accepted as the environmental driver that ended the era of the great hunt. Whereas utility vanished at the margin of portability for paleo-people, the Neolithic brought profound changes to material culture and thus to no…
Alphabetic literacy changed the way that humans thought of nature. It is the pre-Socratics, the Greeks, and to a lesser extent the Egyptians and Romans, who in their theorizing of nature appear as our kindred spirits, even if we believe their theories are mistaken, in their commitment to rational explanation. A clear line separates pre-alphabetic from post-alphabetic accounts of nature; the mythic…
First, Aristotle introduced the category of cause as a key explanatory feature for theorizing nature. He understood the diverse phenomena and different kinds in nature in terms of four causes: the formal, material, efficient, and final. Aristotle's account of causation surpasses the theories of his predecessors. For example, his notion of material cause chimes with the atomism of Leucippus …
Facilitated in part by advances in instrumentation, such as the telescope and microscope, the scientific revolution brought paradigmatic change to the idea of nature. When Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) observed moons orbiting Jupiter on a predictable schedule, the consequences were enormous. Earth could no longer be conceived as the center of the cosmos, as the focal point of a godly creation…
While the advances made by Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes were considerable, history's judgment is that Newton revolutionized Western thinking, dominating his age much as Aristotle did that of the Greeks. Many of his notions, such as the absolute nature of space and time, were repudiated in the twentieth century. And yet Newtonian ways of thinking rule today's culture, lying at the he…
Classical science assumed that objectivity depended upon the separation of the knowing observer from the world of nature. Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theory of evolution upset that assumed separation forever, reinserting humankind into a cognizable view of nature. Darwin's penetrating insights into the nature of our own humanity—and the importance of language—ar…
Reflecting the dominant notion of nature as nothing more than atoms–in motion subject to mechanical laws, an unparalleled fusion of science, technology, and market capitalism colored the twentieth century. During the eighteenth century the Newtonian worldview was translated into an economic theory of marketplace capitalism by Adam Smith (1723–1790). Market societies of the twentieth …
There is no definitive twentieth-century idea of nature. The turn of the century marked the beginning of a virtual revolution in the work that collectively constitutes the new physics. Albert Einstein's (1879–1955) theory of special relativity challenged the Newtonian notion of absolute space and time. And yet Einstein's theories did not support conceptual relativism. He was a…
Clearly, the idea of nature is semantically and conceptually conflicted. If we think of nature as meaningful across multiple temporal and spatial scales, from the cosmic to the subatomic, then we can also understand that our dysfunctional relations are due in part to our lack of either the ability or the commitment to integrate knowledge of nature across scales. Contemporary thinkers argue that th…
Aczel, Amir D. God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999. Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of N…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments