II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Twintelligent Gaiable Knowledge

4. Whole World Philosophy: An Ubuntu Universe

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Open to Reason: Muslin Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. We note this edition by the Senegalese scholar especially for its chapter which reviews the thought of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) (see Diagne 2019 above for more). A poet, philosopher and activist, Iqbal’s writings offer a unique evolutionary vision which advises that Islamic culture could just as well be a source of creative development, instead a fatal fixation with the past. In regard, a dynamic, future-oriented version akin to Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard could inform and guide Muslin culture so to accommodate both unitary and pluralist modes. Such a liberal allowance has at its central theme an advance of personal individuality as a “co-collaborator” with divine creativity.

What does it mean to philosophize in Islam? This unique work traces Muslims’ intellectual and spiritual history of examining beliefs and tenets to show how Islam has long engaged texts and ideas both inside and outside its compass. From classical figures such as Avicenna to the twentieth-century Sufi teacher of tolerance Tierno Bokar (1875-1939), Diagne shows that philosophizing in Islam in its many forms has meant a commitment to forward and open thinking. A remarkable history of philosophy in the Islamic world, this book seeks to contribute to the revival of a spirit of pluralism rooted in Muslim intellectual and spiritual traditions. (Publisher excerpt)

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Postcolonial Bergson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. As his Wikipedia page notes, the author is a Senegalese scholar who has followed a similar path, 50 year later, as Leopold Senghor (search) as he received a philosophy doctorate from the University of Paris Sorbonne. After some years at Cheikh Anto Diop University in Dakar, from 1993 to 1999 he was national Counselor for Education and Culture. Dr. Diagne currently teaches philosophy at Columbia University in New York, check Amazon for his luminous writings. An edited version of the book summary below well describes this volume. See his 2018 Open to Reason below and also In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought with Jean-Loup Arnselle due in May 2020.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is a premier French vitalist writer, yet his influence extends well beyond to Africa and South Asia. Herein Bergson’s thought is shown to be a prime resource for two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and Léopold Senghor (1906-2001). One Muslim and the other Catholic, they played an central role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found in Bergson’s organic vision a deep support for their political and cultural projects. For Iqbal, a founding father of Pakistan, his conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with a need to “reconstruct religious thought in Islam” which could allow for innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital, along with those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), informed an African socialism (in between Marx and money) and his visions of an unalienated African future. (Publisher, edits)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana. Computational Natural Philosophy: A Thread from Presocratics through Turing to ChatGPT. arXiv:2309.13094.. The Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden polyscholar continues her especial writings whereby this historic human sense of an intrinsic literate source, which we seem made ans meant to decode, gains a luminous 21st century appreciation. But in these years, the very idea of a phenomenal nature to philosophize about is rarely considered. (See the special issue Contemporary Natural Philosophy in the MDPI journal Philosophies that she co-edits.) Typical subjects are Historical Roots of Computational Natural Philosophy; The Conceptual Evolution of Modern Computational Natural Philosophy, From Leibniz to Turing to ChatGPT; and Naturalist Computationalism. To wit, some manner of immaterial, implicate, encoded agency seems to infuse and inform life’s quickening, awakening, emergence. And the long quest just now arrives at its large language Earthificial Intelligence. See also her paper Morphological Computing as Logic Underlying Cognition in Human, Animal, and Intelligent Machines (review herein) at arXiv:2309.13979. for even more.
Modern computational natural philosophy conceptualizes the universe in terms of information and computation, establishing a framework for the study of cognition and intelligence. This perspective has significantly influenced our understanding of the natural world and AI systems like ChatGPT based on deep neural networks. Advancements have been facilitated by interdisciplinary research which integrates knowledge from multiple fields to simulate complex systems. Large Language Models (LLMs) represent this approach's capabilities, utilizing reinforcement learning with human feedback. (Abstract)

In sum, the success of contemporary computational natural philosophy is based on the use of advanced computational thinking and techniques to comprehend and investigate natural phenomena, including the behavior of matter, energy, and living organisms with humans and human societies. This interdisciplinary research field merges knowledge, insights, and techniques from computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, and other natural sciences with humanities, and other domains to create models and simulations of complex systems in their broad context and in relation to each other. (12)

Modern computational natural philosophy conceptualizes the universe in terms of information and computation, establishing a framework for the study of cognition and intelligence. This perspective has significantly influenced our understanding of the natural world and AI systems like ChatGPT based on deep neural networks. Advancements have been facilitated by interdisciplinary research which integrates knowledge from multiple fields to simulate complex systems. Large Language Models (LLMs) represent this approach's capabilities, utilizing reinforcement learning with human feedback. (Abstract)

In sum, the success of contemporary computational natural philosophy is based on the use of advanced computational thinking and techniques to comprehend and investigate natural phenomena, including the behavior of matter, energy, and living organisms with humans and human societies. This interdisciplinary research field merges knowledge, insights, and techniques from computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, and other natural sciences with humanities, and other domains to create models and simulations of complex systems in their broad context and in relation to each other. (12)

Dorato, Mauro. The Software of the Universe: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of the Laws of Nature. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. A University of Rome philosopher of science wonders whether physical parameters and biological invariances might be considered in some way as nature’s intrinsic algorithmic program. Huge questions result of whether we humans “construct” them, or might they exist “independently;” does order evolve from a primal chaos, or “precede” on by endemic plans? See also Dorato’s paper “Mathematical Biology and the Existence of Biological Laws” in D. Dieks, et al Probabilities, Laws and Structure (Springer, 2012).

Dyson, Freeman. What Can You Really Know? New York Review of Books. November 8, 2012. A review of Why Does the World Exist? by writer Jim Holt (Liveright, 2012) who interviewed physicists such as David Deutsch and Steven Weinberg in Britain and the U.S. about any meanings that may or may not be limned from quantum multiverse cosmologies. But immersed as anyone in this endeavor since the 1950’s, Freeman is distressed by the current abysmal state of conjecture. For centuries scientific pursuits were seen as “natural philosophy,” exemplified by a Newton or Darwin. But Dyson laments and indicts the late 19th and 20th century disconnect of science from philosophical guidance so that it could stand as a field alone. With philosophy seen as “dead” by Stephen Hawking (2012, search), or a “sorry lot” as below, with no succor from postmodern humanities, extant reality now just spins off into vacuous speculative theories and opinions. It is quite an intent of this website to scope out with much documentation how a 21st century recovery of a natural philosophy, in a radical way now due to a personal worldwide humankind, is possible and might be achieved.

For most of the twenty-five centuries since written history began, philosophers were important. Two groups of philosophers, Confucius and Lao Tse in China, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, were dominant figures in the cultures of Asia and Europe for two thousand years. Confucius and Aristotle set the style of thinking for Eastern and Western civilizations. They not only spoke to scholars but also to rulers. They had a deep influence in the practical worlds of politics and morality as well as in the intellectual worlds of science and scholarship.

In more recent centuries, philosophers were still leaders of human destiny. Descartes and Montesquieu in France, Spinoza in Holland, Hobbes and Locke in England, Hegel and Nietzsche in Germany, set their stamp on the divergent styles of nations as nationalism became the driving force in the history of Europe. Through all the vicissitudes of history, from classical Greece and China until the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers were giants playing a dominant role in the kingdom of the mind.

Holt’s philosophers belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compared with the giants of the past, they are a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academic audiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant. At some time toward the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers faded from public life. Like the snark in Lewis Carroll’s poem, they suddenly and silently vanished. So far as the general public was concerned, philosophers became invisible.

Eco, Umberto. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. The renowned author is a true Renaissance person, and in this scholarly work from his University of Bologna years before The Name of the Rose can be found a unique history of dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Elias, Amy and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. As modernity and postmodernism become passé, this collection tries try to move to a vital global milieu going forward, guided by Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity” image (search) so as to attain some manner of a “cosmodern philosophy” (search Moraru).

A groundbreaking essay collection that pursues the rise of geoculture as an essential framework for arts criticism, The Planetary Turn shows how the planet—as a territory, a sociopolitical arena, a natural space of interaction for all earthly life, and an artistic theme—is increasingly the conceptual and political dimension in which twenty-first-century writers and artists picture themselves and their work. In an introduction that comprehensively defines the planetary model of art, culture, and cultural-aesthetic interpretation, the editors explain how the living planet is emerging as distinct from older concepts of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism and is becoming a new ground for exciting work in contemporary literature, visual and media arts, and social humanities. Written by internationally recognized scholars, the twelve essays that follow illustrate the unfolding of a new vision of potential planetary community that retools earlier models based on the nation-state or political “blocs” and reimagines cultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical relationships for the post–Cold War era.

Ellis, Brian. The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002. An emeritus La Trobe University philosopher is brave enough to confront the banishment from mechanistic science since the 17th century of any intrinsic, independent properties or qualities. As a result, dross matter passively is imposed on by contingent laws, it has no active, internal force or essence of its own. Any effort today to remove this taboo would involve a new nature as a greater reality or creation, presently inadmissible and unthinkable. As a further attempt, the consideration is taken up by Olivier Rieppel, Curator of Evolutionary Biology at the Chicago Field Museum, in his paper “New Essentialism in Biology” in Philosophy of Science, (77/5, 2010) where he mentions Ellis’ advocation.

Farooqui, Jamil. Indegeneity of Knowledge: Criteria for Universalisation. Man in India. 92/3-4, 2012. An International Islamic University, Malaysia, sociologist reminds that for a learned global repository to be truly “universal” it needs, in addition to Western editions, to contain the vast erudite resources of the Restern, especially so called Third World peoples. Please refer to the website of its Indian publisher www.serialspublications.com/default.asp for an extensive array of scholarly and practical journals from the subcontinent and beyond, which testifies to a worldwide noosphere whereof such materials are, or should be, accessible to anyone everywhere.

Ferry, Luc. A Brief History of Thought. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011. The University of Paris philosopher offers a synopsis of his many writings, which from our 21st century allows a view of the whole sweep of humankind’s conjecture, angst and wonderment. “Religion” becomes the human thrall before an encompassing Deity, but divinity can be seen as graced by transcendent and immanent realms. “Philosophy” by turns affirms “the exercise of our own resources and our innate faculty of reason,” which augurs for a dichotomy of God and human. A contrast also stands between an original Greek (and Asian) sense of an abiding, organic cosmos with a harmonious order to serve daily guidance, and its despair and abandonment unto enlightened, mechanical modernity. While it has been long hoped that human inquiry could “discover” a pre-existing reality, in our late “constructivist” postmodernism, we must struggle to make one up out of a chaotic nothingness.

But if contemplative “theoria” may again become wisdom, Luc Ferry alludes that an epochal resolve may at last be at hand. This current, failed materialism is to be rejected and surpassed by a historical synthesis – a welling “personification” of the Divine in both heavenly and incarnate modes, with a progressive, historic “divinization” of the human. Which, if to allow the reach of imagination, opens to a reading and presence of universe and human as father, mother, and daughter/son children. Pray we might be able once again in time to witness both Parents and Earth’s own birthright nativity.

Frodeman, Robert and Adam Briggle. Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st Century Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. University of North Texas scholars argue that this venerable pursuit, for centuries seen as the “science of all things” and the “queen of the sciences,” has lately been turned into one more narrow, impotent discipline by institutional academic structures. Rather than a preeminent natural philosophy, as it was from the Greeks to Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, today it is preoccupied with arcane linguistic analysis. See also the author’s New York Times article When Philosophy Lost Its Way (January 11, 2016).

Professional philosophy has strayed so far from its roots that Socrates wouldn’t stand a chance of landing tenure in most departments today. After all, he spent his time talking with people from all walks of life rather than being buried in the secondary literature and polishing arguments for peer-reviewed journals. Yet somehow this hypertrophy styles itself ‘real’ philosophy. Socrates Tenured diagnoses the pathologies of contemporary philosophy and shows how the field can be revitalized. The first part of the book sketches the crisis facing philosophy in a neoliberal age and traces its roots back to the 20th-century move to turn philosophy into an academic discipline. In the second part the authors look at various attempts from applied ethics to their own brand of ‘field philosophy’ to confront the resulting problems of insularity and societal irrelevance. Part three connects this evaluation of philosophy with wider discussions in the politics of knowledge about the impacts of research on society. The final chapters consider both what impacts philosophy might have and what a philosophy of impact might look like.

Gade, Christian. A Discourse on African Philosophy: A New Perspective on Ubuntu and Transitional Justice in South Africa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. An Aarhus University (Denmark) professor of human security provides an academic review of how political movements such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may or may not understand or avail this “ethnophilosophic” tradition of African culture. Although much analysis goes on, its reciprocal essence of person in community, I am because we are, is not well emphasized.

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