Abstract
A look at the course of the history of Western philosophy will show that it has been fixated with certain philosophical theories. The terms of their discourse have informed our culture and our whole outlook on life. Each historical period may be characterized by some notion or theory that plays a dominant role until subjected to enough scrutiny and discussion to be tested and the evidence for it found wanting. As the formulation of a theory is eroded and its appeal fades, it then under pressure yields place to an incoming idea and becomes secondary in our deliberations or recedes into the background.
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Notes
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 ).
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., p. 65.
René Thom, “Preface,” in Jean Largeault, Systèmes de la nature (Paris: Vrin, 1985), p. iv; and “La creation de nouveau par le hasard; un vieux theme epicurien,” Archives de philosophie 53 (1990).
Thom, “Preface,” op. cit., p. iv.
Ibid.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Boulder: New Science Library; New York: Random House, 1984 ).
Ibid., p. ix.
Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, “Introduction,” Exploring Complexity (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1989), p. ix.
Ibid., pp. 71–141.
Ibid., pp. 45–71.
Ludwig Boltzmann, Populäre Schriften ( 1905 ) ( Braunschweig-Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1979 ).
Prigogine and Stengers, op. cit., pp. 257–290.
Thom, op. cit.
Largeault, Systèmes, op. cit.
Creation et désordre, recherches et pensées contemporaine (Paris: L’Originel, 1987 ), ( Interviews with Henri Atlan, Guitta Pessis-Pasternak, Gérard Ponthieu, and Michel Treguer).
David Ruelle, Hasard et chaos (Paris: O. Jacob, 1991); Ivar Ekeland, Le calcul, l’imprévu (Paris: Seuil, 1984 ). For fascinating explanations of chaos theory geared to the layman as well as of related theories making up the “New Science,” see James Gleick’s, Chaos, Making a New Science ( New York: Penguin Books, 1988 ).
Ekeland, op. cit., pp. 122–153.
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (updated and augmented) ( San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1977 ).
Ibid.
Alexandre Kojève, L’Idée du déterminisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne ( Paris: Librarie générale française, 1990 ).
We may, as some scientists do, doubt the revolutionary character of the “New Science.” Several of its innovative intuitions and insights into nature had been voiced as far back as Leibniz, who discovered already the fractal forms found in nature, as Mandelbrot adverts to. The same Leibniz was bound to the mechanical model even as he was voicing the dynamism characteristics of nature-life; but in fact, he emphasized forcefully the omnipresence of living creatures and the infinite richness of their forms. We may also recall the emphasis on the dynamism of the All in the thought of Schelling, one so pervading sentient factors that he could speak of the “soul of the cosmos.” It could also be said that already in the nineteenth century the discovery of thermodynamics broke the static, mechanical Newtonian model.
But today we have discoveries on all sides, in biology, genetics, evolutionary research, all dealing with the nature of “crises,” with temporal, changeable, transformational phenomena being joined to these are the insights of the social sciences, economics, political theory. (See Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 3rd ed. [New York: John Wiley, 1996].) They all see at the roots of nature-life and social and cultural life the irregular, the changeable, the critical, transformation, becoming, innovation. The concomitance of all this is indeed something new.
This change of emphasis from the static to the dynamic, from the necessity of the certain to the unpredictable does not mean, however, a negation of order, an abandonment of rationality, a renunciation of solving the mysteries of life — a point to which we shall return.
See Creation et désordre, op. cit., pp. 13–53.
Leo Kadanoff, quoted in James Gleick, Chaos, Making a New Science ( New York: Penguin Books, 1988 ), p. 189.
Kojève, L’Idée du Déterminisme, op. cit., p. 152.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., p. 157.
Stanley Salthe, Development and Evolution, Complexity and Change in Biology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 44: “Once more I remind the reader that what I am taking about is not the world but discourse.”
Niels Bohr, (1928), pp. 245ff; and his Die Naturwissenschaften (quoted by Kojève, op. cit., p. 000).
Kojève, op. cit., p. 167.
For this context, see Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 1: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXIV ( Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988 ).
William Capelle, Die Vorsokratiker, die Fragmente und Quellenberichte übersetzt und eingeleitet (Leipzig: A. Kroner, 1935), p. 148. In my monograph The Great Plan of Life, in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997 ), I quote and discuss this fragment.
Rudolf Allers, “Microcosmos from Anaximander to Paracelsus,” Traditti 2 (1944), pp. 319–409.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 2 vols.
Ibid., p. 1055.
Ibid., pp. 1054–1055.
Ibid., p. 1055.
Steven Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Philogeny ( Cambridge, Mass.: Bellknap Press, 1977 ), p. 000.
For a fuller treatment of cultural creation, see Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Book 3: The Passions of the Soul and the Elements in the Ontopoiesis of Culture. The Life Significance of Literature ( Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990 ).
See my elaboration of the Human Condition in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, The First Principles of Phenomenology of Life, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XVII ( Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978 ).
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Tymieniecka, AT. (1999). The Ontopoiesis of Life as a New Philosophical Paradigm. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Life Scientific Philosophy, Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 59. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2079-3_1
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