On the eve of a new century we tend to ask ourselves which has been the outgoing century's foremost contribution to the advancement of humanity. To our mind come several names, such as that of Einstein, who added his physics to the classic one of Newton, opening a whole new world of discoveries and applications of impressive magnitudes.
The name of Freud has lost its luster for reasons related to controversial issues. Yet there is no doubt that his contributions to the knowledge and understanding of the personal unconscious' realm projected candid, albeit not necessarily engaging, vistas in the area of psychology and psychopathology, drastically influencing the arts and every day's life.
Fleming and Salk are two of many names associated with revolutionary contributions to health. Life span has been extended, quality of life vastly improved, gerontology advanced, and euthanasia given ever more sophisticated tools; theology has had a field day expanding its musings about the sanctity of life, whatever the constraints. The relationship between AIDS, for one, and a drastically modified ecosystem of pathogenic organisms, awaits the coming century for its clarification.
Watson and Crick discovered life's chemical blueprint. So many minds contributed to the deciphering of the genes and their roles, culminating in the recent cloning of an adult mammal, that pages would be needed to just print their names.
The attainments of the NASA and other august bodies in the exploration of the universe are legion. Grounds have been detected to believein the uninterrupted expansion of the universe forever and ever. Still, who gave the flick that started the Big Bang remains the unsurpassed whodunit.
Just continuing the present description would demand a lot of typing. I must makemy point: Science and Technology have been the winners in the 20th century! We, the humans, explore and discover, because we can think and put in words the results of our thinking. Only we --of all living organisms, culminating in the most closely related primate, the chimpanzee-- can boast of being able to prove that we can think about thinking, i.e., of meta-thinking. Without that capability, we could not have thought about organized, deliberately directed research, and of setting up experiments to discover the laws of nature.
Have I left something outside of this introduction? Oh, yes, the INTERNET! The greatest power on Earth in almost every realm, channeled its existentially- driven thinking through its pentagonic nerve center with a view to improving emergency communication channels, and the serendipitous result was making a virtual village out of most earthlings' dwellings...
And then I start developing a NEW PHILOSOPHY, a PHILOSOPHY FOR THE 21st CENTURY, which I refer to as SCIENTIFIC DYNAMIC PHILOSOPHY (DSP).
THIS PAGE OF MINE endeavors to serve as an interface between Science,
Philosophy, and the Layman. Its platform is composed of Brain, Mind and Thinking.
Yet I have left unmentioned one aspect of the advances in science, which is, the exploration of man's mind.
Therefore, why not consider that the most important advances of this century have been the fruits of research aimed at exploring the human brain, in what respects to its most sophisticated manifestation? Which is the mind, as we so call the capability of thinking --be it in unconscious, subconscious or mainly conscious-- manner. Realizing that thinking is absolutely dependent on memory, the discovery that memory is made of specific ('thinking') proteins has opened the road to the 'soul' of the human being. We can now say with confidence, "We may not be entirely determined by our genes, but certainly we are what our proteins dictate."
Its Medium is the Internet. Its Symbol, a circle containing a spanning triangle containing an inverted spanning triangle.
Later on, Thales realized that Nature has its own laws, which are not subservient to the gods' caprices.
Philosophy was now born, and soon the trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
lifted it to heights undisputed, only widened.
But Aristotle's mind felt not cozy in only mental gymnastics; no, he gathered the existing body of knowledge, classified it and added more of his own, thus imposing order and furthering intellect's reaches; his were the first tentative steps to Science. It was the 17th century which witnessed the minds of Galileo, Descartesand so many others develop experiment as the life-giving embodied spirit of science as we understand it now.
Technology became its flamboyant offshoot, wagging hubris undeterred.
Philosophy defined the limits of theology, while science limited philosophy. Only man's intellect will limit science's scope. But in the realm of philosophy, frontiers had to be defined, too. And it were thinkers who spoke of positivistic, empiric, logic and analytic approaches to the subjects of human interest, who disavowed abstruse metaphysical philandering, paving so the way for Language to become the foremost object of Philosophy, and rightly so, because language is at the vertex of man's intellect (a word referring to mind's thinking and meta-thinking capacities).
Theology, then, might as well be defined as the area of thinking where man has to rely on faith and on a sublime sense of intuition, to reach conclusions which he won't be able to substantiate.
Contrastingly, philosophy deals with areas of thinking about realities evident to all, yet not submissive to measure and even less so, to quantification.
Moral and ethical obligations, as defined by Revelation, were therefore entirely entrusted to theology's guardianship, while moral and ethical constraints, as defined by men in given societies, guilds and groups, were willingly adopted by philosophy; the Law, then, whether positive or natural, developed as one ofphilosophy's several departments.
What would be the scope of the NATURAL PHILOSOPHY? Firstly, it is an entirely New Philosophy, with no reasons for competing with time-honored schools of thought, be they Western or Oriental. More critically, it will start as a philosophy to be developed by individuals who have access to the Internet and, specifically, now, to Geocities.
An effort is to be directed at integrating in some measure the three branches of the mind's creative urge. In truth, as the creator and develper of D-SP, I have had the rare opportunity of superposing the opening paragraph of Genesis on the opening paragraph of a different version of the Universe's creation, to wit, the one posited by the physicists under the name of Big Bang. I shall post it here.
In a similar vein, I plan to delve on other three quasi-universal themes present in Genesis; firstly, on God's Names. This theme touches on existential questions, which are themselves part theology, part philosophy. It touches also on history, at the time of Hellenistic influence in the Land of Israel; an attempt will be made to rationalize both the ineffable property of God's Name and the imposition of total circumcision, as nationalistically motivated.
The second theme will be a Freudian-Jungian interpretation of 'Jacob's Ladder Dream,' the intention being to make it comprehensible as representing part of an adolescent biological makeup, craftily rendered in Genesis by Jewish sages possessing a mind touching on Freudian and Jungian unconscious. The core of such interpretation I have exposed in the short contribution 'On Survival,' for which a recent scientific publication served as the motivating force.
The third theme will be a comprehensive interpretation of Adam and Eve's Paradise story, with a view to understanding a basic anxiety of women, culminating in ancient times in a 'therapeutic' act which may explain the significance of Cain's story. Parts of this theme I have also broached somewhere else (www.serendip.brynmawr.edu/) . But then, quite recently I discovered in Adam and Eve's 'Paradise,' a mother lode for analyzing 'original sin' in a completelycontemporaneous way, whereby it can be understood that such 'sin' is actually a parable of man's (woman included, of course) natural quest for Cartesian doubt and for empirically acquired knowledge, both forerunners of the Scientific Method. Likewise, the great divide of Creationism vs. Darwinism will be understood as expressing an ancient reality, therefore calling for a rational approach to the chasmic differences between human intellects.
Thus, the Natural Philosophy is to be developed by people who profess mainly philosophic-scientific interests and who accept Darwinism as an unquestionable branch of science.
ADDENDUM: Initially, I referred to the philosophy I've discovered and keep nurturing, as The New Philosophy. Then, I came to realize that the correct title is not 'New,' but Natural. Because it had been always 'there,' just as the American continent had been, until it was 'discovered.' As America came to be part of the geography known to man, when the technology and Columbus made it happen, so the Natural Philosophy came to be part of Philosophy when the scientific advances mentioned above created the conditions for its 'discovery.' Thus, I did not 'create' it, just 'discovered' it. What I did and do create, is the way of presenting it to the eyes of the interested reader.
By the same token, as America (the 'New World') is there to stay, so is the Natural Philosophy, making it, not a philosophy for the 21th century, but for all the centuries, as long as Nature exists...
MORE ADDENDUM.- Still, it so happens that the Name 'Natural Philosophy' creates confusion with previous bodies of philosophy. In fact, the concept of 'Nature' is confusing, as I care to explain in the essay 'On Nature' (Look up 'Chatting on Nature') at my Library. For that reason, I decided to name the philosophy I'm nurturing Dynamic-Scientific Philosophy . The 'addendums' serve to emphasize the dynamic quality of this approach to knowing the world.