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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

A. Historic Prescience: Individual Homo Sapiens

Smith, Justin E. H. Divine Machines and the Sciences of Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. A Concordia University, Montreal, philosopher elucidates the prescience of Gottfried Leibniz’s (1646-1716) natural philosophy as he conceptualized an inherently animate worldly essence in an age when the mechanical model was on the rise. In its theoretical crux, an ancient doubleness was evoked of an “immaterial, monadic life force” which informed extant organic life, broadly conceived. It is worth notice in this Alan Turing year (search George Dyson), that Leibniz’s alphabetic-mathematical corpus is being referred to as a prime precursor of the software-hardware scheme of modern computers, although he seemed to express a genotype and phenotype.

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, Divine Machines takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Smith casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. (Publisher)

Vitalism was by and large “panvitalism.” Leibniz, Henry More, Francis Glisson, and numerous others saw everything in nature as biological; Rene Descartes and his followers, conversely, saw biological phenomena as explicable in the ordinary terms of mechanical physics. (3)

Sole, Ricard, et al. Criticality and Scaling in Evolutionary Ecology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 14/4, 1999. Some twenty years ago, this collaboration of RS, Susanna Manrubia, Micheal Benton, Stuart Kauffman, and Per Bak offered an early, prescient glimpse of a repetitive natural hierarchy composed of a reciprocal balance at each scale. Circa 2019, as this website documents, this once and future revelatory vision is now well confirmed.

Fluctuations in ecological systems are known to involve a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, often displaying self-similar (fractal) properties. Recent theoretical approaches are trying to shed light on the nature of these complex dynamics. The results suggest that complexity in ecology and evolution comes from the network-like structure of multispecies communities that are close to instability. If true, these ideas might change our understanding of how complexity emerges in the biosphere and how macroevolutionary events could be decoupled from microevolutionary ones. (Abstract)

Sommerer, Christa and Laurent Mignonneau. Modeling the Emergence of Complexity, the Origin of Life and Interactive Online Art. Leonardo. 21/2, 2002. We cite this paper by Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, Japan artists as an early example of nonlinear systems theories which was sensed even then to bring about an historic revolution for these subject fields. An astute notice of phase transition, diverse unities, order/chaos balance qualities was drawn upon to scope out artistic projects, and how the global Internet might serve a cultural florescence.

But as I finally enter in May 2022, where are we now, what has it all come to. While a procreative ecosmic universe is becoming quite evident as attributed to a worldwise sapience, the Internet is much weaponized for fraud, violence, tearing apart than peaceable eco-communitues. This natural genesis resource since 2002 continues as an endeavor to arrange, report, document in search of senses to come to.

Sorokin, Pitirim. Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law and Relationships. London: Routledge, 1985. The Russian American historian (1889 – 1968) was at Harvard University for many years and once president of the American Sociological Assoc. Our entry records an earlier 20th century perception arcing back to Marx, Hegel and beyond of a historic scale and sequence of events and societies. Today, however such an independent model is rejected by academic thought since any deeper, implicate phase exists at all.

Sorokin came to view social and cultural dynamics in terms of three major processes: a major shift of mankind's creative center from Europe to the Pacific; a progressive disintegration of the sensate culture; and finally the first blush of the emergence and growth of a new idealistic sociocultural order. (Wikipedia)

Stott, Rebecca. Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2012. The British author divides her year between teaching English Literature at the University of East Anglia, and Cambridge where she writes in the University Library such superb volumes. Charles Darwin, under duress from poor health, sans any library, along with urgencies to publish On the Origin of Species, gave little notice to precursors. Academic texts chronicle in part this train but here the earlier, consistent glimpses come alive as they flow across centuries and continents back from Robert Chambers, Erasmus Darwin, Denis Diderot, Leonardo da Vinci, many others, to Arabia and Aristotle. An intuitive sense of life’s progressive metamorphosis has an ancient lineage, which seemed to attract visionaries taken with a curious fossil or fabulous creature. What retrospective worldwide vantage we now have to view humankind’s singular learning of a true evolutionary gestation. But per Mary Gregory’s study of Diderot above, it still remains to get it right, an embryonic developing phenotype, but alas absent a natural, informing genotype.

During the Christmas celebrations of 1860 Charles Darwin sat down to try to assemble a list of his predecessors, the men who had held evolutionary ideas before him. But as he was such a poor scholar of history, he told his friends, he failed to find more than ghostly presences and vestiges of their lives. In this epic chronicle of scientific courage and insight, Rebecca Stott goes in search of those first evolutionists whose intellectual originality and daring have been lost to us and to Darwin. She rediscovers Aristotle walking the shores of Lesbos with his pupils and Leonardo da Vinci searching for fossils in the mine-shafts of the Tuscan hills; Diderot, in Paris, exploring the origins of species while under the surveillance of the secret police, and the brilliant naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes finding evidence for evolutionary change in the natural history collections stolen during the Napoleonic wars. Darwin’s Ghosts is a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, as well as the history of a profoundly dangerous idea. (Publisher)

The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals” he (Leonardo) wrote in the Leicester Codex, “is interwoven with a network of veins, which are all joined together, and formed for the nutrition and vivification of the earth and of its creatures.” Microcosm and macrocosm; connectedness across the cosmos; common patterns and structures not fixed in geometrically structured shapes but forever moving. (74) “ …that, just as an individual organism in the animal or vegetable kingdom comes into being, grows, reaches maturity, perishes and disappears from view, so whole species may pass through similar stages.” (Denis Diderot, 143)

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Human Phenomenon. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 1999. A more faithful translation and annotated edition by Sarah Appleton-Weber.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. The many writings in a scientific, philosophical and spiritual genre of this Jesuit priest and paleontologist run from World War I to expeditions and exile in China to final years in New York. Teilhard’s project was to bring into Christianity an evolutionary dimension for the temporal ascent from matter to life, mind and spirit. This expansive cosmos genesis distinguished by emergent tiers of complexity and consciousness has been a main alternative to the mechanical model which looks in the other direction. These nested stages trace an axis of intensified personal interiority and freedom along with enhanced community. By this perspective, human beings are its latest intended phase of sentient intelligence converging toward a worldwide unity. Teilhard contends that by the recurrent principle of creative union this event will in turn enhance personal liberty and welfare.

I shall try to show how it is possible if we look at things from a sufficiently elevated position, to see the confusions of detail in which we think we are lost, merge into one vast organic, guided, operation, in which each of us has a place. (Man’s Place in Nature. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. 15)

Thomas, Emily, ed. Early Modern Women on Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. The editor, a University of Durham, UK historian and philosopher, has collected essays about these feminine scholars in their male 17th century milieu. Some chapters are Anne Conway on the Identity of Creatures over Time, Elizabeth of Bohemia as a Naturalistic Dualist and Margaret Cavendish (search) on the Metaphysics of Imagination. As Jessica Riskin’s history herein recounts, an abiding theme is an organically numinous procreation instead of a mindless materialist machine.

The work of women philosophers in the early modern period has traditionally been overlooked, yet their writing on topics such as reality, time, mind and matter holds valuable lessons for our understanding of metaphysics and its history. This volume of new essays explores the work of nine key female figures: Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Émilie Du Châtelet. Investigating issues from eternity to free will and from body to natural laws, the essays uncover long-neglected perspectives and demonstrate their importance for philosophical debates, both then and now.

Thomas, Lewis. The Medusa and the Snail. New York: Viking, 1979. The physician and author continues his insightful views of how the earth as seen from space seems most like a viable, sentient cell.

It seems to me a good guess, hazarded by a good many people who have though about it, that we may be engaged in the formation of something like a mind for the life of this planet. (18)

Toliver, Harold. Mythic Worlds and the One You Can Believe In. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2017. We cite this essay by an emeritus British professor of comparative literature because it takes a long, deep view of the historic course of hominid to human stirrings, evocations, imaginations and inquiries as they may or may not close upon viable knowledge. We would presently wish that the late 21st century occasion of a worldwide collective intelligence might at last be reaching a true, vital discovery and salutary wisdom which we familial peoples seem meant to achieve.

Combining philosophy, science, and literature, Mythic Worlds and the One You Can Believe In examines lingering misconceptions of world history as a continuing source of international tension. Awareness of the natural continuum, currently gauged at some 13.8 billion years overall, disarms sectarian zealotry and, in retrospect, explains some of the difficulties the literary and philosophical traditions have had in accommodating their beliefs to what undeniably exists. To this day, beliefs incompatible with natural history continue to intensify nationalism and support terrorist movements. As a work mainly in natural philosophy, this book uses the consensus natural continuum to critique the more prominent and durable misconceptions. (Summary)

When ideas expressed in words became possible, probably some 50 to 40 millennia age, Homo sapiens gained in capacity to disseminate ideas in detail. That is what enable groupthink and allowed the invention of fables. Discourse became the great enabler. It was free eventually to conjure angels from the clouds and devils from underground caverns as well as demons in enemy camps. Because it is just as willing to serve imagination as logic, distinguishing facts from myths became one of the more arduous and frequent things the brain is assigned to do. (x)

Urbas, Joseph. Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. The University of Bordeaux-Montaigne philosopher well revives the essence of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the premier American 19th century Transcendentalist thinker. But as the quote advises, in that bygone age in contrast to our own, a numinous presence abided. A creative nature was involved in a continuum of “causation and continuity, a direction and flow,” broadly from matter to spirit. If this perennial vision can be properly seen and expressed, for RWE it can provide vital guidance and meaning for the course of human lives.

This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emerson's metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Urbas tells the story of the making of a metaphysician and in so doing breaks with the postmodern, anti-metaphysical readings that have dominated Emerson scholarship since his philosophical rehabilitation began in late 1970s. This is an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also a chapter in the cultural life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself, the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change. Emerson's Metaphysics proposes an account of Emerson's metaphysical thought as it unfolds in his writings, as it informs his philosophy as a whole, and as it reflects the intellectual and religious culture in which he lived and moved and had his being.

Valtonen, Mauri, et al. The Three-Body Problem from Pythagoras to Hawking. Switzerland: Springer International, 2016. We note this volume by authors from Finland, Russia, USA, West Indies, and Japan as a capsule of humankind’s long historical endeavors to imagine, explore, test, quantify, describe, and record how local and cosmic nature is well composed. Surely there must be a grand reason that we Earthlings can do this.

This book reviews and explains the three-body problem in historical context reaching to latest developments in computational physics and gravitation theory. The long history of the problem from Pythagoras to Hawking parallels the evolution of ideas about our physical universe, with a particular emphasis on understanding gravity and how it operates between astronomical bodies. The oldest astronomical three-body problem is the question how and when the moon and the sun line up with the earth to produce eclipses. The introduction of computers in the last half-a-century has revolutionized the study. One of the most recent developments has been in the treatment of the problem in Einstein’s General Relativity, the new theory of gravitation which is an improvement on Newton’s theory.

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