II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

4. Whole World Philosophy: An Ubuntu Universe

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)

Salthe, Salthe. Perspectives on Natural Philosophy. Philosophies. 3/3, 2018. A contribution to a Contemporary Natural Philosophy issue posted by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and Marcin Schroeder wherein the emeritus Brooklyn College and Binghamton University biologist (search) surveys his lifetime wisdom of a developmental ascendant scale from physical energies to aware entities. His paper was the first in response, followed by some 15 entries such as by Arran Gare, Abir Igamberdiev, Nicholas Maxwell, Robert Ulanowicz, and Joseph Brenner. But since every author is a man, they remain a fragmentary lot, still bereft of a vital, holistic vision of an actual universe and human genesis we so desperately need.

This paper presents a viewpoint on natural philosophy focusing on the organization of substance, as well as its changes as invited by the Second Law of thermodynamics. Modes of change are pointed to as definitive of levels of organization; these include physical, chemical, and biological modes of change. Conceptual uses of the subsumptive hierarchy format are employed throughout this paper. Developmental change in dissipative structures is examined in some detail, generating an argument for the use of final causality in studies of natural systems. Considerations of ‘internalism’ in science are presented along the way. (Abstract)

Schlagel, Richard. The Waning of the Light. The Review of Metaphysics. 57/1, 2003. A senior academic philosopher finds the intellectual project that began the Greeks to have run its course and come up with naught. The best it can hope for is to help students think more coherently. This article is typical for a discipline that has painted itself into a corner, isolated from a global and cosmic science at the very time when a humanist philosophical vision is most needed.

Schwartz, Michael, et al, eds. Dancing with Sophia: Integral Philosophy on the Verge. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. An original collection that reflects on Ken Wilber’s decadal scholarship by the subtitle name (search). While we appreciate Wilber’s project to reweave perennial, psychological and holistic themes (search), an issue arose with this book. While the name Sophia represents the Greek goddess of wisdom, and has been availed by many endeavors, here all fifteen writers and editors are men. On a December day of impeachment hearings, when a report issued on the long Afghan war concludes it was blundering carnage, an essential woman’s philoSophia is absent.

Shapin, Steven. Hyperprofessionalism and the Crisis of Readership in the History of Science. ISIS. 96/2, 2005. In this venerable history of science journal, the Harvard University scholar provides a keen insight into the current arid, inward, confounded state of academe. The title word means a penchant for ever finer analysis with no sense of contextual situation, dubbed the “aboutness” problem. For some long time, the accepted worldview, or lack thereof, has been that no greater, encompassing reality exists on its creative own to which everything can be attributed. So there is nothing to do philosophy “about.” To which it might be added, that while the journal title “ISIS” signifies this icon of feminine wisdom, for centuries such scholarship has been done entirely by men, who as left brain only, cannot even imagine a unitary genesis.

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