Return of Natural Philosophy

Discussion

Arran Gare:

"Natural philosophy is a tradition that was kept alive and reached a high point with the work of Friedrich Schelling, and has continued in the work of process metaphysicians and scientists rejecting the Newtonian paradigm of science (Gare, 2014). It involves reconceiving nature as relational processes in such a way that the emergence of humans with all their complexity, including their ability to create and develop science, becomes intelligible. Bloch, Castoriadis and Ricoeur all understood this, and wrote works on natural philosophy. However, natural philosophy was only a minor component of their philosophy. Bloch referred back to the radical Aristotelianism of Avicenna, Castoriadis criticised ensemblistic-identitary or ensidic logicand argued that mathematics has limited potential to grasp reality, while Ricoeur referred back to Spinoza. None of these philosophers made any significant contribution to natural philosophy or drew upon or contributed to the sciences influenced by post-Newtonian process metaphysics, despite their sympathy for such developments. With the global ecological crisis, overcoming Cartesian dualism is no longer just an intellectual matter. Climate science, geology, environmental history, ecological economics and above all, ecology, have come to the fore in efforts to comprehend our situation. Ecology, which includes human ecology, provides the transdiscipline that can relate each of these disciplines to each other. Through the development of anti-reductionist ideas in ecology, natural philosophy has been given a new lease of life, making it possible to revive what had appeared to be the defunct discipline of natural history.

Robert Ulanowicz has argued that ecology should replace physics as the pre-eminent discipline for defining and advancing science.

As he put it in his book Ecology, The Ascendent Perspective (1997, 6):

- Ecology occupies the propitious middle ground. ... Indeed ecology may well provide a preferred theatre in which to search for principles that might offer very broad implications for science in general. If we loosen the grip of our prejudice in favour of mechanism as the general principle, we see in this thought the first inkling that ecology, the sick discipline, could in fact become the key to a radical leap in scientific thought. A new perspective on how things happen in the ecological world might conceivably break the conceptual logjams that currently hinder progress in understanding evolutionary phenomena, development biology, the rest of the life sciences, and, conceivably, even physics.

Ulanowicz has further developed this argument in A Third Window (2009).There are a number of elements being integrated in recent developments in theoretical ecology. The most important of these elements are non-linear thermodynamics, hierarchy theory (according to which emergence occurs through the interpolation of enabling constraints) and other developments in complexity theory, including second-order cybernetics, field theories of morphogenesis, and biosemiotics, including biohermeneutics and eco-semiotics."

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1061/1691)