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  • From: David Travis <djtravis@hotmail.com>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Philosophy of Science
  • Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:25:59 +0000



Jason,

Very interesting observation/question.

I think it depends on how far you want to go.

My opinion is that part of the problem is that the atomistic/mechanistic
Cartesian view of nature springs from some basic assumptions about what
knowledge and truth are and how we go about finding those things. I say it's
a problem because a lot of post-modern / multicultural / "post-Cartesian"
interpretations of science and nature nevertheless work from the same
assumptions while at the same time rejecting their thematic consequences.
Which is sort of like the philosophical equivalent of a big oil company
saying it wants to "go green" and end global warming while nevertheless
assuming that fossil fuels will somehow continue to be the world's primary
source of energy.

Personally I think the way to go is with Hegel, but it would be hard to go
into that here in any detail. I think Hegel is very good at fundamentally
grounding both truth and science in human history and culture. The upshot of
his system is that science is brought down to a human scale again, if that
makes any sense, and is no longer this kind of abstract process of
representing an "objective" world in a supposedly neutral way. But the other
important thing is that this way of looking at things allows us to
re-introduce things that would normally be left out of a purely atomistic
model (by "atomistic" I don't necessarily mean modern particle physics but
rather the philosophical tendency to understand things only by a discursive
study of their parts, as opposed to a holistic observation of their essence).

Anyway, that probably isn't much help, but I'm glad folks are thinking about
it. Good luck!

- David


> > Hello, my name is Jason Brown. I did my Perma cert this summer with Scott
> > Pittman in NM. (HI SCOTT!)
> >
> > I am currently doing a masters degree in forestry. While the material is
> > amazing and I am learning a lot. There has been a consistant mechanistic
> > world view expressed and assumed. I am working on a paper analysis for the
> > class and would like to include a critique of the mechanistic world view.
> >




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