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

4. Whole World Philosophy: An Ubuntu Universe

Odhiambo, Thomas. Essence and Continuity of Life in the African Society. Staune, Jean, ed. Science and the Search for Meaning. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006. The first president of the African Academy of Sciences illuminates a conception of an organic milieu composed not only of extant entities, but suffused by an internal, ascendant life pulse. (notice phenotype and genotype in the quote)

Likewise, the Akan people of Ghana consider a human being to be constituted of three elements: the okra, sunsum, and honam. The okra is the innermost self, or life force of the person expressed as a spark of the Supreme Being in the person as the child of God. It is also translated as the English equivalent of the “soul.” The sunsum seems to be equivalent to the spirit of humanity, and with close analysis is not essentially separate from the okra. The honam refers to the physical body. (70) The relationship between God and humankind is as that of a parent and child. (68)

Olney, James. The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy – Yeats and Jung. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. A curious situation has arisen as postmodernism reigns over academia. The mindset takes as its icon, drawn from Deleuze and Guattari, the way that botanical root systems, e.g. crabgrass, send out shoots in every which direction. Such a “rhizome” denotes vicarious branchings but in this guise without any inherent guidance. See Rhizome in the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism which cites “…no determining universal structure.” But from this erudite book not yet entranced, we learn that the word comes from the Greek “rhizomata,” which was used by Empedocles, Plato, and Heraclitus to designate just the opposite. Rather it is from an abiding, “undying, invisible” source that extant flowers bud, blossom, and fade. We enter this contrast as example of our late dark age, which denies any perennial ground of being, relishes in doing so, and mocks the very quest.

Omnes, Roland. Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. The emeritus Universite Paris-Sud XI physicist achieves an extraordinary appreciation of quantum phenomena, which is then set in a continuity with Greek thought and traditional theologies. As a synopsis, this encompassing reality involves two prime aspects – Cosmos and Logos, both an emergent substance, and a mathematical source. Omnes then affirms, with Mircea Eliade, as a capsule of historical and current belief, that a greater reality does and must exist on its own. To sum up: the way we see it, the sacred is everywhere in the universe and nothing is completely profane. Profanity is but an illusion of our own ignorance. (245)

Pabst, Adrian. Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. A University of Kent at Canterbury philosopher stresses once again, with Aquinas and the scholastics nature’s revelatory essence by way of “analogia entis,” an analogical, iterative, recurrent stratification between human, universe and triune Divinity. Rightly, an excessive focus on individuals is to be corrected by their encompassing relationality. Once and future, if you will, here is the ingrained secret code that begs to be realized, ignored at our expense.

This essay seeks to retrieve metaphysics and reveal its theological nature. It shows how ancient and modern conceptions of being in terms of individual substance fail to account for the irreducible, ontological relations that bind immanent, finite beings to each other and to their transcendent, infinite source in God. Instead of some abstract ‘individuality’ that begs the question, the essay suggests that a thing’s unique form is both existentially and essentially its metaphysical positioning in relation to other things. In turn, the relational ordering of all things suggest a priority of relation over substance, which intimates a first principle and final end that is itself relational – the creative relationality of the three divine persons that brings everything out of nothing into actuality and gives all beings a share of Trinitarian being in which the created order participates. (xxvii)

Popova, Maria. The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are. themarginalia.org. June 21, 2021. We cite this entry by the Bulgarian-American essayist to give notice to her wise woman, deeply insightful writings in this online magazine. See also Maria's own website, Wikipedia page, a 2019 book, and TED talk for an array of feminine, double dimension, hopeful imaginations. It also reminds of Jorge Borges' universal textual essence. But we placed within World Philosophy as a luminous version of what must compose a true bicameral, familial integrity if we are ever to move from war to an Earthropocene sustainability.

Titling the essay (The Mirror of Enigmas) after St. Paul’s cryptic statement Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate — We now see through a mirror — Borges considers the tribe of thinkers who have perched their efforts to reconcile knowledge and mystery, the scientific and the spiritual, on the assumption that “the history of the universe — and in it the most tenuous detail of our lives — has an incalculable, symbolical value.” With his poetic precision, he condenses this common hypothesis:

The outer world — forms, temperatures, the moon — is a language humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish.

Portella, Eduardo, coordinator. Thinking at Crossroads: In Search of New Languages. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2002. A volume commissioned by UNESCO to address the current impasse in philosophical thought by an exploration of multicultural avenues. But the international cast seem to be unaware of or exclude the latent discovery of a self-developing universe of which people and bioplanet are a creative phenomenon.

Pylkkanen, Paavo. Mind, Matter, and the Implicate Order. Berlin: Springer, 2007. Reviewed more in Quantum Cosmology, a nascent philosophy of physics to affirm, guided by David Bohm, a singular independent source and its manifest, creative iteration.

Rescher, Nicholas. Axiogenesis: An Essay in Metaphysical Optimalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. The University of Pittsburgh emeritus philosopher of “pragmatic idealism” continues apace with erudite volumes, which is reviewed more in Current Vistas.

Richards, Robert. Darwin’s Metaphysics of Mind. Holse, Vittorio and Christian Illies, eds. Darwinism and Philosophy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. The volume is a collection, over some five years, on the modern evolutionary synthesis, but with 17 men and no women as authors it mostly remains an arid province of materialism, selection, and naturalism. Richards again reminds that Charles Darwin was very much a Romantic in his thought, with his main mentor being Alexander von Humboldt. In this view, life is most distinguished by a progressive emergence from original, absolute mind to its human florescence. Another dissenter in the volume is Rupert Riedl who summarizes his Systems Theory of Evolution that includes embryology and self-organization.

Richardson, Kurt. The Hegemony of the Physical Sciences. Futures. 37/615, 2005. The Anglo/American philosopher/physicist achieves a masterful survey of new approaches to and understandings of the universe as a dynamical complex system. His copious array of papers and projects can be found at: www.kurtrichardson.com.

Ross, James. Thought and World: The Hidden Necessities. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. A work by a University of Pennsylvania law professor that at once exhibits the quandary and corner into which philosophy has got itself, yet with a ray of light. Burdened by an opaque jargon that seems the accepted norm, an attempt is made to describe a biological-like reality that could, in translation, be appreciated to possess both essential phenotype and genotype realms.

Nature acts at every order of magnitude as if following scripts. It is, I urge, a richer hypothesis to regard nature as software everywhere that to regard it as merely elegantly regular “occasions and probabilities of successions” without explanatory insides or encompassing intelligibility (3) There are dynamic structures throughout the cosmos, “software everywhere,” that are the explanatory grounding for natural necessities and for earned counterfactual truth and are understood by way of abstraction that discloses them. (5) It isn’t as if something ghostly and immaterial is added to the material world to organize it. Rather, matter is better regarded mathematically as complexly structured energy. (133)

Salom, Igor. 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and the End of Mechanistic Materialism. arXiv:2308.12297. An Institute of Physics, Group for Gravitation, Particles and Fields, Belgrade researcher provides an insightful observation of this present historic cosmicview shift just going on in our global midst. See his web page and this eprint site for much collegial work. As the Whole World Philosophy section may evoke, a deep sapient insistence to explore and a fantastic universe and human abide seems to occur wherever it can. Into these late 2020s might a revolutionary EarthKinder version be possible to salve, save and begin a new Light age.

The ideas and results that are in the background of the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics had an immense impact on our understanding of reality. Therefore, it is crucial that these implications reach also the general public, not only the scientists in the related fields of quantum mechanics. The purpose of this review is to attempt to elucidate these revolutionary changes in our worldview that were eventually acknowledged also by the Nobel's committee. As we will see, the standard mechanist picture of the universe is no longer a viable option, and can be never again. Nowadays, we know this with certainty unusual for physics, that only a strict mathematical theorem could provide. (Excerpt)

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