(logo) Natural Genesis (logo text)
A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
Table of Contents
Introduction
Genesis Vision
Learning Planet
Organic Universe
Earth Life Emerge
Genesis Future
Glossary
Recent Additions
Search
Submit

I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

A. Historic Prescience: Individual Homo Sapiens

Dick, Steven. Cosmic Evolution: History, Culture, and Human Destiny. Steven Dick and Mark Lupisella, eds. Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. Washington, DC: NASA SP-4802, 2010. An extensive chapter online at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4802.pdf that reviews past intimations of an innately life and people friendly universe, such as by Alfred Wallace and Lawrence Henderson, along with our long imagination of and search for extra-earth signatures and neighbors.

Drack, Manfred. Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Organismic View on the Theory of Evolution. Journal of Experimental Zoology. 324B/77, 2015. A University of Vienna biologist provides a succinct review of the pioneer (1901-1972) Austrian scientist who advanced this Romantic sense of a living nature distinguished by an integrity of wholeness and diverse entity. A mid century school of general systems theory was a result, which has had much influence to this day, such as a current European philosophy expressed in the journal Biological Theory, and the integral work of Jeffery Yi-Lin Forrest.

Eastman, Timothy and Hank Keeton, eds. Physics and Whitehead. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. As noted below in this section, early in the 20th century Alfred North Whitehead promulgated a philosophy of the universe as a developing, personalizing organism. These edited studies which range across the history of science and quantum phenomena find a deep accord between Whitehead’s organic corpus and modern physics. Of much interest is that his process thought appears to anticipate complexity theory. Reality is more than isolated, substantial objects, rather the interrelations between things is the primary property. There is no being without becoming as this procession of “events” or “occasions-in-connection” (systems) spawns an increasingly sensate cosmos. Whitehead is thus gaining recognition as a major philosophical precursor of the 21st century genesis universe.

Edinger, Edward. Ego and Archetype. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. A luminous exposition of the difficult, circuitous path of self-individuation in its mythic, alchemical, metaphysical, religious and trinitarian dimensions.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. The grand cycle of metahistory from its maternal inception and long patriarchical dominance now reaches a critical juncture between continued oppression or empathic transformation to a partnership of women and men for the good of children. Eisler’s perspective is uniquely informed by the sciences of complexity just appearing.

Ekeland, Ivar. The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. A Universite Paris-Dauphine mathematician of Norwegian descent writes a retrospective of Pierre Maupertuis (1698-1759), a premier French polymath scholar, who advanced this title view that God’s plan was to achieve an optimum earthly state by a principle of most efficient or least action. While the book presents a good review along with Descartes, Galileo, Lagrange, Leibniz, Newton, and Voltaire, it goes on to say that ever since, due to an expansive cosmic evolution, nature has lost coherence to a degree that no innate design or ordained fate is evident at all. We also cite this work to note an essay review Writing Nature’s Greatest Book by Freeman Dyson in the New York of Review of Books (October 19, 2006), which contrasts a French idealist emphasis with an otherwise European and American emphasis of substantial objects. Dyson, our own resident sage, then proceeds to advise a 21st century complementary synthesis of mathematics and materiality.

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? This question has preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the answer. This book is their story. Ivar Ekeland here takes the reader on a journey through scientific attempts to envision the best of all possible worlds. He begins with the French physicist Maupertuis, whose least-action principle, Ekeland shows, was a pivotal breakthrough in mathematics, because it was the first expression of the concept of optimization, or the creation of systems that are the most efficient or functional.
Tracing the profound impact of optimization and the unexpected ways in which it has influenced the study of mathematics, biology, economics, and even politics, Ekeland reveals throughout how the idea has driven some of our greatest intellectual breakthroughs. The result is a dazzling display of erudition—one that will be essential reading for popular-science buffs and historians of science alike.

Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. In this truly landmark volume, the emeritus College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, cultural historian provides a perceptive chapter on Nature as Revelation. It is noted that a prime eastern difference is the absence of a transcendent creator God. While a western trope of nature as a second book exists, it was seen more to evince this Creator than any earthly significance. For perennial Chinese sensibilities the abiding world exemplifies, as daily evidence and guide, the “deepest cosmic forces.” “The eye endowed with understanding could see in a landscape the self-realizing patterns of the Way, the ever-renewed cycles of the complementary impulses driving the world’s changes.” By this ken, an “implicate logic, pattern principles,” can be seen to unfold themselves into vitally active phenomena. Again, here is an original, indigenous, holistic doubleness of independent generative source and consequent overt manifestation. Indeed, the 2012 volume Systems Science by Yi Lin, Xiaojun Duan, Chengli Zhao and Li Da Xu, points out from a Chinese appreciation how well the new nonlinear theories both compare with, and verify, this ancient wisdom.

Enz, Charles and Karl von Meyenn, eds. Wolfgang Pauli Writings on Physics and Philosophy. Berlin: Springer, 1994. We note for Pauli’s 1950 paper The Philosophical Significance of the Idea of Complementarity continues Niels Bohr’s interest in a wider, common notice of reciprocal particle and wave phases. Bohr’s own Danish coat of arms was famously graced by the Yin/Yang symbol. In the ninety years since its 1927 inception, the perennial concept of natural archetypes as infinitely recurrent in kind has grown to our current edge of discovery, see for example M. Gazzaniga’s 2018 The Consciousness Instinct.

It is just this circumstance that may contain in itself, as a corrective to the earlier one-sided view, the germ of progress towards a unified total world-picture, of which the exact sciences are only a part. In this I would like to see the more general significance of the idea of complementarity, an idea that has grown of the soil of physics, as a result of the work of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. In what follows, I wish to explain by simple examples how the idea of complementarity has made possible, within the field of physics, a synthesis of contrasted and at first sight mutually contradictory hypotheses. To achieve this aim, far-reaching generalizations of the old ideal of causality, and even of the idea of physical reality, were of course necessary. The example of two mutually contradictory ideas that has become celebrated in physics is that of the “particle picture” and the “wave picture.” (36)

Epstein, Mikhail. Daniil Andreev and the Mysticism of Femininity. Rosenthal, Bernice, ed. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Reviewed in Gender Complements for precious insights into the maternal Russian soul.

Fabel, Arthur. The Phenomenon of a Discovery: The Unity of a New Science and the Perennial Wisdom. Journal of Social and Biological Structures. 14/1, 1991. I enter in 2021 this 30 year old paper of mine as an example of what glimpses and signs were becoming possible even back then. As the quote notes, my allusion to an evolutionary gestation having reached its late term was some thirty years premature. But over the three decades since, as an enveloping sapiensphere presently learns on her/his own and 8,600 annotated references now attest, such a revolutionary discovery and gravid moment has surely been reached.

The next decade promises to be unlike all the rest as the hour of nativity is different from yet gives meaning to the long embryonic preparation. (10)

Fedorov, Nikolai. What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. London: Honeyglen Publishing, 1990. Select writings by the Russian mystic philosopher (1828-1903) who exemplified an indigenous Sophian vision of a numinous evolution and history from matter to its human spiritual recreation and self-actualization. Fedorov is the central figure, along with Vladimir Vernadsky and others in George Young’s The Russian Cosmists (2012 search). An excellent introduction by Elizabeth Koutaissoff illumes his 19th century country and city life. An esteemed intellectual of his day, he became a librarian at the Russian State Library in Moscow, a confidant to Leo Tolstoy, and tutor for Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His unique contribution was to realize that human beings needed to have a constructive purpose and project, otherwise they would make war. Akin to Karl Marx he sought a philosophy beyond analysis so as to transform not only the world but the whole cosmos by creative intention. As a rarest thinker who spanned the spatial and temporal dominions of religion, science, society, and the humanities, Nikolai Fedorov is now seen as a luminous precursor of the transhumanist movement.

Feltz, Bernard, et al. Self-Organization and Emergence in the Life Sciences. Netherlands: Springer, 2006. This European edition from the mid 2000s is entered in 2018 to illustrate rudimentary inklings of dynamic complexities back then as this endeavor was just getting going by way of individual theories and patchy fragments. Scale-free networks are barely mentioned. We note Self-Organization in Immunology by Henri Atlan, Kant and Intuitions of Self-Organization by Gertrudis Van de Vijver, and Neural Synchrony and Cognitive Functions by Francisco Varela. But in little over a decade, this worldwide revolution has burgeoned to a mature point of critical credence and integral synthesis, as the rest of this site seeks to report and document.

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9  Next