Uma História Do Conhecimento

19/04/2019 Uma história do conhecimento
Uma Breve História do Conhecimento

De 3000 aC a 2001 dC
Piero Scaruffi
Originalmente o leitor de um curso da UC Berkeley e agora também um ebook da Amazon .
Isto nasceu como o livro didático para uma aula da UC Berkeley. Veja os slides da turma (2014) (Um subconjunto de Todos os slides )
TM, ®, Copyright © 2011 Piero Scaruffi Todos os direitos reservados.
When the earliest civilizations appeared (in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China), they were largely
constrained by their natural environment and by the climate. Religion, Science and Art were largely determined
by extra-human factors, such as seasons and floods. Over the course of many centuries, humans have managed
to change the equation in their favor, reducing the impact of natural events on their civilization and increasing
the impact of their civilization on nature (for better and for worse). How this happened to be is pretty much the
history of knowledge. Knowledge has been, first and foremost, a tool to become the "subject" of change, as
opposed to being the "object" of change.
One could claim that the most important inventions date from prehistory, and that "history" has been nothing
more than an application of those inventions. Here is a quick rundown (in parentheses the earliest specimen we
found so far and the place where it was found): tools (2 million years ago, Africa), fire (1.9 million years ago,
Africa), buildings (400,000 BC, France), burial (70,000 BC, Germany), art (28,000 BC), Farming (14,000 BC,
Mesopotamia), animal domestication (12,000 BC), boat (8,000 BC, Holland), weapons (8,000 BC), pottery
(7,900 BC, China), weaving (6,500 BC, Palestine), money (sometime before the invention of writing,
Mesopotamia), musical instruments (5,000 BC, Mesopotamia), metal (4,500 BC, Egypt), wheel (3,500 BC,
Mesopotamia), writing (3,300 BC, Mesopotamia), glass (3,000 BC, Phoenicia), sundial (3,000 BC, Egypt).
The first major civilizations were born in river valleys. Centralized authoritarian regimes are a direct
consequence of large-scale irrigation agriculture: the problem of exploiting a river's power, i.e. of building
precise and timely waterworks, can only be solved by mass labor, by the mobilization and coordination of
thousands of people, which is only possible in societies organized around centralized planning and capable of
imposing absolute discipline. The biggest river the greater the promise of wealth the stronger the "hydraulic
state" has to be. The masses mobilized for waterworks can then be mobilized for other collective efforts, such
as pyramids, temples and fortifications. A navigable river then provided the infrastructure for interacting with
other communities, i.e. for both trade and warfare.
Once the infrastructure was in place, knowledge increased rapidly on all fronts: agriculture, architecture (from
the ziggurat of the Sumerians to the pyramids of the Egyptians to the temples of the Greeks), bureaucracy
(from the city-states of the Sumerians to the kingdom of Egypt, from the empire of Persia to the economic
empire of Athens), politics (from the theocracies of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the democracy of Athens),
religion (from the anthropomorphic deities of Mesopotamia to the complex metaphysics of Egypt, from the
tolerant pantheon of the Greeks to the one God of the Persians and the Jews), writing (from the "Gilgamesh" in
Mesopotamia to the "Adventures of Sinuhe" in Egypt to the "Bible" of the Jews to Homer's epics in Greece),
economics (from the agricultural societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the trade-based societies of Phoenicia
and Athens), transportation (from to the horse-driven chariots of Mesopotamia to the Greek trireme), art (from
the funerary painting of the Egyptians to the realistic sculptures of the Greeks), etc.
For a while, Religion acted as, basically, a compendium of knowledge (about life, society and the universe). In
India, the Vedas and the Upanishads painted a cyclical picture of the universe. Right and wrong actions
increase the positive and negative potential energy ("apurva") associated with each person. Apurva is
eventually released (in this or the next life) and causes good or evil to the person. Basically, misfortune is
caused by prior wrongful deeds. It is not only deserved but even required. Life is a loop from the individual
back to the individual. This was cosmic justice totally independent of the gods. Wisdom is the realization that
everything is suffering, but the realization of suffering does not lead to pessimism: it leads to salvation.
Salvation does not require any change in the world. It requires a realization that everything is part of an
absolute, or Brahman. Salvation comes from the union of the individual soul ("atman") with the universal soul
("brahman"). "Maya", the plurality of the world is an illusion of the senses. Salvation comes from "moksha":
liberation from maya and experience of Brahman. By experiencing the divine within the self, one reaches pure
knowledge and becomes one with the eternal, infinite, and conscious being. Nothing has changed in the world:
it is the individual's state of mind that has changed. Self-knowledge is knowledge of the absolute.
Buddha focused on the suffering, a ubiquitous state of living beings, but ended up denying the existence of the
self: only events exist, the enduring self is an illusion (the "atman" is an illusion). Each moment is an entirely
new existence, influenced by all other moments. To quote a Buddhist scripture, "only suffering exists, but no
sufferer is to be found". Suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance and attachment to Earthly things.
From ancient times, China displayed a holistic approach to nature, man, and government. Chinese religion
realized the fundamental unity of the physical, the emotional and the social. Particularly during the Zhou
dynasty, Chinese religion was natural philosophy. There was no fear of damnation, no anxiety of salvation, no
prophets, no dogmas. Confucius was much more interested in the fate of society than in the fate of the souls of
ordinary people. He believed that the power of example was the ideal foundation of the social contract: a ruler,
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a father, a husband have to "deserve" the obedience that is due to them. Thus, Confucius' philosophy was about
the cultivation of the self, how to transform the ordinary individual into the ideal man. The ultimate goal of an
individual's life is self-realization through socialization. If Confucius focused on society, Lao-tzu focused on
nature. He believe in a "tao", an ultimate unity that underlies the world's multiplicity. There is a fundamental
reality in the continuous flow and change of the world: the "way" things do what they do. Understanding the
"tao" means identifying with the patterns of nature, achieving harmony with nature. The ideal course of action
is "action through inaction" ("wuwei"): to flow with the natural order. The "tao" is the infinite potential energy
of the universe. "Qi" is vital energy/matter in constant flux that arises from the "Tao", and "Qi" is regulated by
the opposites of "Yin" and "Yang". Everything is made of yin and yang.
Note that neither Buddhism nor Confucianism nor Taoism were "religions", in the sense of worshipping a God.
In fact, they all denied the importance of gods.
In Persia, on the other hand, Zarathustra believed in one supreme God that was similar to the Indian "absolute"
of Brahman, except that it was opposed by a divine enemy, and the world was due to the titanic battle between
these two supernatural beings: Ahura-Mazda, the spiritual, immaterial, creator god who is full of light and
good, and Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil. Unlike previous religions, this one was eschatological: at the
end of time, Ahura-mazda shall emerge victorious, and, after the apocalyptic ending and a universal judgement
that will take place on Earth, all humans (even sinners) shall resurrect.
Judaism, which grew out of a synthesis of Mesopotamian, Arabian, Persian and Egyptian religious cults was
originally only the religion of the Jews, and El was originally the nomadic god of a nomadic people (not tied to
a sanctuary but "god of the father"). It was a god of punishment and wrath, and Jewish religion was conceived
as, basically, obedience to El, with the reward for the Jewish people being the Promised Land. The "Old
Testament" is largely silent about the rest of humanity, and largely silent about the afterlife. This was a god
who spoke directly to its people (the Jews). The earliest prophets of the kingdom of Mari has been visionary
mystics in charge of foretelling the future and interpreting natural events as divine messages on behalf of the
royalty. The Biblical prophets, on the other hand, addressed the people (and, eventually, "all nations") and their
main mission was to promote a higher form of morality and justice. Judaism, in its expectation that a Messiah
would come and deliverer the Jews from their suffering, was largely indifference towards unbelievers. In the
meantime, the misadventures of the Jewish people were due to the fact that the Jews disobeyed their god. But,
at some point, El and Yahweh became synonymous, and, eventually, Yahweh became the "only" god ("There is
no other god besides me"). The "Old Testament", which originally was a history of the Jews, acquired a
universal meaning.
Both Mazdaism and Judaism became monotheistic religions and denounced all other gods as mere "idols" not
worthy of worship.
A major step in the evolution of knowledge was the advent of Philosophy. Both in Greece and India, the
explosion in Philosophy and Science was enabled by a lack of organized religion: both regions had a form of
"rational superstition" rather than the theocracies of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The gods of the Greek and of the
Indian pantheon were superhuman, but never tried to explain all that happens on this planet. Philosophers and
scientists were able to speculate on the nature of the universe, of the human life and of the afterlife without
offending the state and fearing for their lives.
In India, six "darshana" (philosophical schools) tried to answer the fundamental questions: is there a God? Is
the world real? Samkhya believed that there is no God and that the world is real (due to the interaction between
two substances, prakriti and purusha). Yoga believed in a supreme being (Isvara) and that the world is real.
Vedanta believed in Brahman and that the world is not real (it is an emanation of Brahman, the only substance
that truly exists).
In Greece, Pythagoras was perhaps the first philosopher to speculate about the immortality of soul. Heraclitus
could not believe in the immortality of anything, because he noticed that everything changes all the time ("you
cannot enter the same river twice"), including us ("we are and we are not"). On the contrary, Parmenides, the
most "Indian" of the Greek philosophers, believed that nothing ever changes: there is only one, infinite, eternal
and indivisible reality, and we are part of this unchanging "one", despite the illusion of a changing world that
comes from our senses. Zeno even proved the impossibility of change with his famous paradoxes (for example,
fast Achilles can never catch up with a slow turtle if the turtle starts ahead, because Achilles has to reach the
current position of the turtle before passing it, and, when he does, the turtle has already moved ahead, a process
that can be repeated forever). Democritus argued in favor of atomism and materialism: everything is made of
atoms, including the soul. Socrates was a philosopher of wisdom, and noticed that wisdom is knowing what
one does not know. His trial (the most famous religious trial before Jesus') signaled the end of the dictatorship
of traditional religion. Plato ruled out the senses as a reliable source of knowledge, and focused instead on
"ideas", which exist in a world of their own, are eternal and are unchangeable. He too believed in an immortal
soul, trapped in a mortal body. By increasing its knowledge, the soul can become one with the ultimate idea of
the universe, the idea of all ideas. On the contrary, Aristotle believed that knowledge "only" comes from the
senses, and a mind is physically shaped by perceptions over a lifetime. He proceeded to create different
disciplines to study different kinds of knowledge.
The Hellenistic age that followed Alexander's unification of the "oikoumene" (the world that the Greeks knew)
on a level never seen before fostered a new synthesis of views of the world. Hellenistic philosophy placed more
emphasis on happiness of the individual, while Hellenistic religion place more emphasis on salvation of the
individual. Cynics, who thought that knowledge is impossible, saw attachment to material things as the root
problem, and advocated a return to nature. Skeptics, who agreed that knowledge is impossible, thought that the
search for knowledge causes angst, and therefore one should avoid having beliefs of any sort. Epicureans, who
had a material view of the world (the universe is a machine and humans have no special status), claimed that
superstitions and fear of death cause angst. Stoics viewed the entire universe as a manifestation of god and
happiness as surrendering the self to the divine order of the cosmos, as living in harmony with nature.
From the very beginning, knowledge was also the by-product of the human quest for an answer to the
fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of our lives? What happens when we die? Is it
possible that we live forever in some other form? The afterlife and immortality are not knowledge, since we
don't "know" them yet, but humans used knowledge to reach different conclusions about these themes. The
civilizations of Mesopotamia were mainly interested in "this" life. The Egyptians were obsessed with the
afterlife, with immortality originally granted only to the pharaoh but eventually extended to everybody (via the
mysteries of Osiris, the first major ritual about the resurrection). The ancient Greeks did not care much for
immortality, as Ulysses showed when he declined the goddess' invitation to spend eternity with her and
preferred to return to his home; but later, in the Hellenistic period, a number of religious cults focused on
resurrection: the Eleusinian mysteries (about Demeter's search through the underworld for her daughter
Persephone), the Orphic mysteries (about Orpheus' attempt to bring back his wife Eurydice from the
underworld) and the Dionysian mysteries (about Dionysus, resurrected by his father Zeus). The Romans cared
for the immortality of their empire, and were resigned to the mortality of the individual; but it was under
Roman rule that a new Jewish religion, Christianity, was founded on the notion that Jesus' death and
resurrection can save all humans.
The other great theme of knowledge was (and still is) the universe: what is the structure of the world that we
live in? Neither the Indian nor the Greek philosophers could provide credible answers. They could only
speculate. Nonetheless, the Hellenistic age fostered progress in mathematics (Euclid's "Geometry" and
Diophantus' "Arithmetic") and science (Erarosthenes' calculation of the circumference of the Earth,
Archimedes' laws of mechanics and hydrostatics, Aristarchus' heliocentric theory, Ptolemy's geocentric theory).
The Romans' main contribution to the history of knowledge may well be engineering, which, after all, is but the
practical application of science to daily life. The Romans, ever the practical people, made a quantum leap in
construction: from aqueducts to public baths, from villas to amphitheaters. At the same time, they too created a
new level of unification: the unification of the Mediterranean world.
The intellectual orgy of Greek philosophy opened the western mind. The Romans closed it when they adopted
Christianity as "the" imperial religion and turned it into a dogma. Christianity was born a Jewish religion, but it
was "relocated" to Rome and thus, automatically, turned into a universal religion. Jesus' god was substantially
different from the original El/Yahweh of the "Old Testament": it was, first and foremost, a god of love. Jesus
was the very son of God, sent to the Earth to die for humans and thus save them from the original sin. St Paul
made it clear that it was love for everybody, not just for the Jews; and that the "kingdom" of the Christian faith,
God's reward for the faithful, was in heaven, not on Earth. The catch was that unbelievers were no longer
immune from God's judgement: they risked eternal damnation. The reward for the faithful was resurrection,
just like Jesus had resurrected. Christianity was the culmination of a tradition of mysteries for the salvation of
the individual, of religion for the ordinary man and woman, even for the slaves. Its central theme was one of
resurrection and eternal life available to everybody. Indirectly, it was also an ideology of universality and
equality.
In fact, both Buddhism and Christianity, and, to some extent, Confucianism, were universal and egalitarian.
They were not exclusive of a race, a gender, or a social class. This achievement in religion marks a conceptual
step in which ordinary people (even slaves) were beginning to see themselves as equal to the kings, albeit
powerless.
Islam, another offshoot of Judaism, was the culmination of the trend towards monotheist, eschatological,
egalitarian and universal religions. Islam borrowed from the Persian philosopher Mani the idea of a succession
of revelations given to different peoples by the very same God (Allah) and it borrowed from Christianity the
idea of universal brotherhood and the mission to convert the unbelievers. But, unlike its predecessors, Islam
was also an ideology, because it prescribed how to build a state. It made it the duty of every Muslim to struggle
for the creation of a universal Islamic state. Islam's Earthly mission was to reform society and to form a nation.
Islam's mission was inherently political. The ultimate aim of the Islamic state is to develop social justice. What
had been a subtle message in Christianity became an explicit message in Islam. In fact, the entire Muslim
population (not just the priestly class) is in charge of running the Islamic state. Humans are granted limited
popular sovereignty under the suzerainty of God.
The Islamic philosophers felt the need to reconcile Islam and Greek philosophy. The two who exerted the
strongest influence on the West, Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina Avicenna and Abu al-Walid
Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd Averroes, achieved such a momentous unification of
religion and philosophy by envisioning the universe as a series of emanations from Allah, from the first
intelligence to the intelligence of humans. This allowed them to claim that there is only one truth, that appears
like two truths: religion for the uneducated masses and philosophy for the educated elite. But there is no
conflict between reason and revelation: ultimately, they both reach the same conclusions about the existence of
Allah. The sufists, best represented by Ibn Arabi, added an almost Buddhist element: human consciousness is a
mirror of the universal, eternal, infinite consciousness of Allah. Allah reveals himself to himself through
human consciousness. The Sufi wants to achieve a state of participation in the act of self-revelation. The human
condition is one of longing, of both joy (for having experienced the divine) and sorrow (for having lost the
divine).
The invasions of the "barbaric" people of the east, the Arab invasion from the south and the wars against the
Persian empire, led to the decadence of Roman civilization and to the "dark age" that lasted a few centuries.
The obliteration of culture was such that, eventually, Europe had to re-learn its philosophy, science and
mathematics from the Arabs.
The Christian dogma contributed to the decline of the Greek ideal. Rationality was replaced by superstition.
Virtue was replaced by faith. Justice in this world was replaced with justice in the next world. The free exercise
of reason was replaced with obedience to the Church. The Greek tolerance for foreign faiths was replaced by
the intolerance of the Church. Nonetheless, Christianity emulated Islam in trying to reconcile religion and
philosophy. St Augustine preached the separation (grounded in Greek philosophy) of body and soul, of bodily
life and spiritual life: the pleasures of the body detract/distract from the truth of the soul.
During the "dark ages", the Christian conversion of the European pagans, from Russia to Scandinavia, was
completed. The Church, in fact, replaced the Roman empire as the unifying element of Europe. The Church
controlled education. The Church controlled the arts. The Church even controlled the language: Latin.
The Arab invasion disrupted the economic and political unity of the Mediterranean Sea, and the rise of the
Frankish kingdom, soon to be renamed "Holy Roman Empire" (a mostly landlocked empire) caused a redesign
of the main trade routes away from the sea. Venice alone remained a sea-trading power, and, de facto, the only
economic link between Holy and Eastern Roman Empires. This "inland" trade eventually caused a
"commercial" revolution. Trade fairs appeared in Champagne, the Flanders, and northern Germany, creating a
new kind of wealth in those regions. The Italian communes became rich enough to be able to afford their own
armies and thus become de-facto independent and develop economies entirely based on trade. In northern
Europe, a new kind of town was born, that did not rely on Mediterranean sea. Both in the north and in the
south, a real bourgeois class was born. The medieval town was organized around the merchants, and then the
artisans and the peasants.
As the horse became the main element in warfare, the landowner became the most powerful warrior. A new
kind of nobility was created, a land-owning nobility. The collapse of central authority in western Europe led to
feudalism, a system in which the nobility enjoyed ever greater power and freedom, a global "political"
revolution.
Thus the "medieval synthesis": Church, cities, kings (clergy, bourgeoisie, nobility).
But a fourth element was even more important for the history of knowledge. As Rome decayed, and Alexandria
and Antioch fell to the Muslims, the capital of Christian civilization moved to Constantinople (Byzantium).
Despite the Greek influence, this cosmopolitan city created great art but little or no philosophy or science. It
was left to the monasteries of western Europe to preserve the speculative traditions of the Greek world, except
that they were mainly used to prove the Christian dogma. Monasticism was nonetheless crucial for the
development of philosophy, music, painting. The anarchy of the "dark age" helped monasteries become a sort
of refuge for the intellectuals. As the choice of lay society came down to being a warrior or a peasant, being a
monk became a more and more appealing alternative. Eventually, the erudite atmosphere of the monasteries
inspire the creation of universities. And universities conferred degrees that allowed graduates to teach in any
Christian country, thus fueling an "educational" revolution. Johannes Scotus Erigena, Peter Abelard, Thomas
Aquinas, Johannes Eckhart, John Duns Scotus (the "scholastics") were some of the beneficiaries. Western
philosophy restarted with them. As their inquiries into the nature of the world became more and more "logical",
their demands on philosophy became stricter. Eventually, Roger Bacon came to advocate that Science be
founded on logic and observation; and William Occam came to advocate the separation of Logic and
Metaphysics, i.e. of Science and Church.
The commercial revolution of the new towns was matched by an "agricultural" revolution of the new manors.
The plough (the first application of non-human power to agriculture), the three-field rotation (wheat/rye,
oats/legumes, fallow) and the horseshoe caused an agricultural revolution in northern Europe that fostered rapid
urbanization and higher standards of living. Improved agricultural techniques motivated the expansion of
arable land via massive deforestation.
In the cities, a "technological" revolution took place. It started with the technology of the mill, which was
pioneered by the monasteries. Mills became pervasive for grinding grain, fulling clothes, pressing olives and
tanning. Textile manufacturing was improved by the spinning wheel (the first instance of belt transmission of
power). And that was only the most popular instance of a machine, because this was the first age of the
machines. The mechanical clock was the first machine made entirely of metal.
There also was a military revolution, due to the arrival of gunpowder. Milan became the center of weapon and
armor manufacturing. Demand for cannons and handguns created a whole new industry.
Finally, an "engineering/artistic" revolution also took place, as more and more daring cathedrals started dotting
the landscape of Christianity. Each cathedral was an example of "total art", encompassing architecture,
sculpture, painting, carpentry, glasswork. The construction of a cathedral was a massive enterprise that
involved masons, workers, quarrymen, smiths, carpenters, etc. Not since the Egyptian pyramids had something
so spectacular been tried. Each cathedral was a veritable summa of European civilization.
The political, commercial, agricultural, educational, technological and artistic revolutions of the Middle Ages
converged in the 13th century (the "golden century") to create an economic boom as it had not been seen for
almost a millennium.
Improved communications between Europe and Asia, thanks to the Mongol Empire that had made travel safe
from the Middle East to China, particularly on the "silk road", and to the decline of the Viking and Saracen
pirates, led to a revival of sea trade, especially by the Italian city-states that profited from a triangular trade
Byzantium-Arabs-Italy.
Florence, benefiting from the trade of wool, and Venice, benefiting from the sea trade with the East, became
capitalistic empires Venice sponsored technological innovation that enabled long-distance and winter voyages,
while Florence sponsored financial innovation that enabled to lend/borrow and invest capital worldwide. The
Italian cities had a vested interest in improved education, as they need people skilled in geography, writing,
accounting, technology, etc. It is not a coincidence that the first universities were established in Italy.
The economic boom came to an abruptly stop by a plague epidemics ("the Black Death") that decimated the
European population. But the Black Death also had its beneficial effects. The dramatic decrease in population
led to a higher standard of living for the survivors, as the farmers obtained more land per capita and the city
dwellers could command higher wages. The higher cost of labor prompted investments in technological
innovation. At the same time, wealthy people bequeated their fortunes to the creation of national universities
which greatly increased the demand for books. The scarcity of educated people prompted the adoption of
vernacular languages instead of Latin in the universities.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the national literatures had produced national epics such as "Beowulf" (900,
Britain), "Edda" (1100, Scandinavia), "Cantar del Cid" (1140, Spain), Chretien de Troyes' "Perceval" (1175,
France), "Slovo o Ploku Igoreve" (1185, Russia), "Nibelungen" (1205, Germany), "Chanson de Roland" (1200,
France), Wolfram Von Eschenbach's "Parzival" (1210, Germany). Dante Alighieri' "Divine Comedy" (1300)
heralded a new age, in which the vernacular was used for the highest possible artistic aims, a veritable
compendium of knowledge. After languishing for centuries, European poetry bloomed with Francesco
Petrarca's "Canti" (1374, Italy), Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" (1400, England), Inigo Santillana's
"Cancionero" (1449, Spain), Francois de Villon's "Testament" (1462, France). And Giovanni Boccaccio's
"Decameron" (1353, Italy) laid the foundations for narrative prose.
In observance with the diktat of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), that the visual artist must work for the
Church and remain faithful to the letter of the Bible, medieval art was permeated by an aesthetics of
"imitation". Christian art was almost a reversal of Greek art, because the emphasis shifted from the body
(mortal, whose movement is driven by emotions) to the soul (immortal, immune to emotions), from realism and
movement to spirituality and immanence. Christian art rediscovered Egyptian and Middle-eastern simplicity
via Byzantine art. Nonetheless, centuries of illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, frescoes and icons eventually led
to the revolution in painting best represented by Giotto's "Scrovegni Chapel" (1305). While Italian artists were
re-founding Greco-Roman art based on mathematical relationships and a sense of three-dimensional space, as
in Paolo Uccello's "Battle of St Romano" (1456), Masaccio's "Trinity" (1427) and Piero della Francesca's
"Holy Conversation" (1474), Northern European painters became masters of a "photographic" realism as in Jan
Van Eyck's "The Virgin of the Chancellor Rolin" (1436) and "The Arnolfini Marriage" (1434).
Before Europe had time to recover from the Black Death, the unity of the Mediterranean was shattered again by
the fall of Byzantium (1453) and the emergence of the Ottoman empire (a Muslim empire) as a major European
power.
However, Europe was coming out of the "dark age" with a new awareness of the world. Marco Polo had
brought news of the Far East. Albertus Magnus did not hesitate to state that the Earth is a sphere. Nicolas
Oresme figured out that the rotation of the Earth on an axis explains the daily motion of the universe.
In China, the Han and Tang dynasties had been characterized by the emergence of a class of officials-scholars
and by a cultural boom. The Sung dynasty amplified those social and cultural innovations. The scholar-officials
become the dominant class in Chinese society. The state was run like an autocratic meritocracy, but nonetheless
a meritocracy. As education was encouraged by the state, China experienced a rapid increase in literacy which
led to a large urban literate class. The level of competence by the ruling class fosterd technological and agrarian
innovations that created the most advanced agriculture, industry and trade in the world. When Europe was just
beginning to get out of its "dark age", China was the world's most populous, prosperous and cultured nation in
the world. The Mongol invasion (the Yuan dynasty) did not change the character of that society, but, in fact,
added an element of peace: the "pax tatarica" guaranteed by the invincible Mongol armies.
India was the only part of the non-Chinese world that Chinese scholars were fascinated with. They absorbed
Indian culture over the centuries, and particularly adopted one philosophical school of India: Buddhism. First
came "Pure Land" or Jodo Buddhism (4th c), with its emphasis on devotion instead of meditation, Then
Tiantai/Tendai (6th c), Huayan/Kegon (7th c) and Chan/Zen (6th c). The latter, a fusion of Buddhism and
Taoism, focused on attainment of sudden enlightenment ("satori"). According to the Northern school (Shen-
hsiu) satori was to be obtained by gradual enlightenment through guided meditation, while the Southern school
(Huineng) allowed for satori through individual meditation. Zen promoted spontaneous thinking, as opposed to
the philosophical investigation of Confucianism, spontaneous behavior as opposed to the calculated behavior of
Confucianism. Zen is the "everyday mind".
Japan had adopted Buddhism as a state religion already in 604, under prince Shotoku Taishi, next to a
Confucian-style constitution and the native shinto cult. The various Buddhist schools arrived from China in the
following centuries (the Tendai school in the 9th century, the Jodo school in the 12th century), until Zen
Buddhism reached Japan during the 13th century. Zen became popular among the military class (the "samurai")
that embodied the noble values in an age of anarchy. In turn, the Zen monk came to behave like a spiritual
samurai. From 1192 till 1333, Japan was ruled by "shogun" (military leaders) with residence in Kamakura (the
"bakufu" system of government), while the emperor (or "mikado") became a figurehead. Even the equivalent of
the scholar-official of China was military: during the 17th century, the ideal man was the literate warrior who
lived according to "bushido" ("way of the warrior"). Japan remained largely isolated until 1854, when the USA
forced Japan to sign a treaty that opened Japan to foreign trade, a humiliation that led to the restoration of
imperial power (1868) after so many centuries of military rule.
Japan's native religion, Shinto, provides the bases for the imperial institutions. It is, in fact, a form of Japanese
patriotism. It declares Japan a divine country, and the emperor a descendant of the gods. Shinto is polytheist to
the extreme, admitting in its pantheon not only thousands of spirits ("kami"), personifying the various aspects
of the natural world, and ancestors, but also the emperors and the deified heroes of the Japanese nation, and
even foreign deities. Shinto is non-exclusive: a Shintoist can be a Buddhist, a Catholic, etc. The reason is that
there is no competition between Shinto and the metaphysics of the other religions. Shinto is a religion to deal
with ordinary lives, based on the belief that humans can affect Nature by properly honoring the spirits. When
Japan adopted Buddhism, the Native spirits were recast as manifestations of Buddha.
The "Rinzai" school of Zen Buddhism believed in sudden enlightenment while concentrating to solve a koan
("sanzen", or conversation with a master). The "Soto" school believed in gradual enlightenment through
meditation in daily life ("zazen", or sitting meditation). But the traditions of Japanese society surfaced also in
Zen Buddhism: satori can be facilitated by martial arts, tea ceremonies, gardening, Haiku poetry, calligraphy,
No drama, etc.
In marked contrast to the western civilizations, the eastern civilizations of India, China and Japan displayed
little interested in the forceful spread of their religious beliefs.
Luckily for Christian Europe, in 1492 Spain opened a new front of knowledge: having freed itself of the last
Arab kingdom, it sponsored the journey of Christopher Columbus to the "West Indies", which turned out to be
a new continent. That more or less accidental event marked the beginning of the "colonial" era, of "world
trade", and of the Atlantic slave trade; and, in general, of a whole new set of mind.
Other factors were shaping the European mind: Gutenberg's printing press (1456), which made it possible to
satisfy the growing demand for books; Martin Luther's Reformation (1517), which freed the northern regions
from the Catholic dogma; Copernicus' heliocentric theory (1530), that removed the Earth (and thus Man) from
the center of the universe; and the advent of the nation states (France, Austria, Spain, England and, later,
Prussia).
However, it was not the small European nations that ruled the world at the end of the Middle Ages. The largest
empires (the "gunpowder empires") were located outside Europe. Gunpowder was only one reason for their
success. They had also mastered the skills of administering a strong, centralized bureaucracy required to
support an expensive military. In general, they dwarfed Europe at one basic dimension: knowledge. While
Europe was just coming out of its "dark age", the gunpowder empires were at their cultural peak. The Ottoman
Empire, whose capital Istanbul was the largest city in Europe, was a melting pot of races, languages and
religions. It was a sophisticated urban society, rich in universities and libraries, devoted to mathematics,
medicine and manufacturing. The Safavid Empire of Persia, that controlled the silk trade, was a homogeneous
state of Muslim Persians. The Mughal Empire of India, an Islamic state in a Hindu country, was also a melting
pot of races, languages and religions. Ming China was perhaps the most technologically and culturally
advanced of all countries.
The small European countries could hardly match the knowledge and power of these empires. And, still, a
small country like Portugal or Holland ended up controlling a larger territory (stretching multiple continents)
than any of those empires. A dis-united Europe of small and poor states caught up in an endless loop of
intestine wars, speaking different languages, technologically backwards, that had to import science, philosophy
and technology from the Muslims, that had fewer people and resources than the Asian empires, managed to
conquer the entire world (with the only notable exception of Japan). Perhaps the problem was with the large-
scale bureaucracies of those Asian empires, that, in the long term, became less and less competitive, more and
more obscurantist. In some cases, their multi-ethnic nature caused centrifugal forces. Or perhaps Europe
benefited from its own anarchy: continuous warfare created continuous competition and a perennial arms race.
Perhaps the fact that no European power decisively defeated the others provided a motivation to improve that
was missing in the more stable empires of the East. After all, the long-range armed sailing ships, which opened
the doors to extra-European colonization, were the product of military build-up. Soon, world trade came to be
based on sea transportation, which was controlled by Europeans. The printing press, which the gunpowder
empire were slow to adopt (or even banned), slowly changed the balance of knowledge. World trade was
creating more demand for technological innovation (and science), while the printing press was spreading
knowledge throughout the continent. And all of this was funded with the wealth generated by colonialism.
While the Asian empires were busy enjoying their stability, the small European countries were fighting for
supremacy, anywhere anytime; and, eventually, they even overthrew those much larger empires.
Nowhere was the apparent oxymoron more intriguing than in Italy, a fragmented, war-torn peninsula that,
nonetheless, became the cultural center of Europe. On a smaller scale, it was the same paradox: the tiny states
of Italy and the Netherlands were superior in the arts to the powerful kingdoms of Spain, France and England.
In this case, though, the reason is to be found in the socio-economic transformation of the Middle Ages that had
introduced a new social class: the wealthy bourgeoisie. This class was more interested in the arts than the
courts (which were mainly interested in warfare). The main "customer" of the arts was still the Church, but
private patronage of art became more and more common. This, in turn, led to an elite of art collectors and
critics. Aesthetics led to appreciation of genius: originality, individuality, creativity. Medieval art was imitation,
Renaissance art was creation.
Perhaps the greatest invention of the Renaissance was the most basic of all from the point of view of
knowledge: the self. The Egyptians and the Greeks did not have a truly unified view of the self, a unique way
to refer to the "I" who is the protagonist of a life and, incidentally, is also a walking body. The Greeks used
different terms (pneuma, logos, nous, psyche) to refer to different aspects of the "I". The Middle Ages were the
formative stage of the self, when the "soul" came to be identified with the thinking "I". The Renaissance simply
exalted that great medieval invention, the "I", that had long been enslaved to religion. The "I" was now free to
express and affirm itself.
In a nutshell, the "Rinascimento" (Renaissance art) adapted classical antiquity to Biblical themes. This was its
fundamental contradiction: a Christian art based on Pagan art. An art that was invented (by the Greeks) to
please the pagan gods and (by the Romans) to exalt pagan emperors was translated into an art to pay tribute to
the Christian dogma. Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" (1497) and Michelangelo Buonarroti's "The
Universal Judgement" (1541) are possibly the supreme examples in painting, while architects such as Donato
Bramante and Gianlorenzo Bernini dramatically altered the urban landscapes. But there was also an obsession
with ordering space, as manifested in Sandro Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring" (1478) and Raffaello Sanzio's
"The School of Athens" (1511). In the Netherlands, Hieronymous Bosch's "The Garden of Delights" (1504)
was perhaps the most fantastic piece of art in centuries.
The Renaissance segued into the Baroque age, whose opulence really signified the triumph of European royalty
and religion. Aesthetically speaking, the baroque was a restoration of order after the creative disorder of the
Renaissance. The least predictable of the visual arts remained painting, with Pieter Bruegel's "Triumph of
Death" (1562), Domenico El Greco's "Toledo" (1599), Pieter Rubens' "Debarquement de Marie de Medicis"
(1625), Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" (1642), Jan Vermeer's Malkunst (1666). In Italy, Giovanni Palestrina,
Claudio Monteverdi (1567) and Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583) laid the foundations for classical music and the
opera. The national literary scenes bloomed. Masterpieces of poetry included Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando
Furioso" (1532), Luiz Vas de Camoes' "Os Lusiadas" (1572), Torquato Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata" (1575),
Pierre de Ronsard's "Sonnets pour Helene" (1578), John Donne's "Holy Sonnets" (1615), John Milton's
"Paradise Lost" (1667). Even more characteristic of the era was theater: Gil Vicente's "Auto da Barca do
Inferno" (1516), Christopher Marlowe's "Faust" (1592), William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (1601) and "King
Lear" (1605), Lope de Vega Carpio's "Fuente Ovejuna" (1614), Pedro Calderon's "El Gran Teatro del Mundo"
(1633), Moliere's "Le Misanthrope" (1666) and JeanBaptiste Racine's "Phedre" (1677). Francois Rabelais'
"Gargantua et Pantagruel" (1552) and Miguel Cervantes' "Don Quijote" (1615) laid the foundations of the
novel.
Progress in science was as revolutionary as progress in the arts. Tycho Brahe, who discovered a new star, and
Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, Francis Bacon, who advocated knowledge
based on objective empirical observation and inductive reasoning, and finally Galileo Galilei, who envisioned
that linear uniform motion (not rest) is the natural motion of all objects and that forces cause acceleration
(which is the same for all falling objects, i.e. the same force must cause objects to fall), Suddenly, the universe
did not look like the perfect, eternal, static order that humans had been used to for centuries. Instead, it looked
as disordered, imperfect and dynamic as the human world.
New inventions included: the telescope (1608), the microscope (1590s), the pendulum clock (1657), the
thermometer (1611), the barometer (1644).
Both the self and the world were now open again to philosophical investigation. Rene‚ Descartes neatly
separated matter and mind, two different substances, each governed by its set of laws (physical or mental).
While the material world, including the body, is ultimately a machine, the soul is not: it cannot be "reduced" to
the material world. His "dualism" was opposed by Thomas Hobbes' "materialism", according to which the soul
is merely a feature of the body and human behavior is caused by physical laws.
Baruch Spinoza disagreed with both. He thought that only one substance exists: God. Nature is God
("pantheism"). The universe is God. This one substance is neither physical nor mental, and it is both. Things
and souls are (finite) aspects (or "modes") of that one (infinite) substance. Immortality is becoming one with
God/Nature, realizing the eternity of everything.
Gottfried Leibniz went in the other direction: only minds exist, and everything has a mind. Matter is made of
minds ("panpsychism"). Minds come in degrees, starting with matter (whose minds are very simple) and
ending with God (whose mind is infinite). The universe is the set of all finite minds (or "monads") that God has
created. Their actions have been pre-determined by God. Monads are "clocks that strike hours together".
Clearly, the scientific study of reality depended on perception, on the reliability of the senses. John Locke
thought that all knowledge derives from experience ("empiricism"), and noticed that we only know the ideas
and sensations in our mind. Those ideas and sensations are produced by perceptions, but we will never know
for sure what caused those perceptions, how reality truly is out there: we only know the ideas that are created in
our mind. Ideas rule our mind
On the contrary, George Berkeley, starting from the same premises (all we know is our perceptions) reached the
opposite conclusion: that matter does not even exist, that only mind exists ("idealism"). Reality is inside our
mind: an object is an experience. Objects do not exist apart from a subject that thinks them. The whole universe
is a set of subjective experiences. Locke thought that we can never know how the world really is, but Berkeley
replied that the world is exactly how it appears: it "is" what appears, and it is inside our mind. Our mind rules
ideas
David Hume increased the dose of skepticism: if all ideas come from perception, then mind is only a theater in
which perceptions play their parts in rapid succession. The self is an illusion. Mental life is a series of thoughts,
feelings, sensations. A mind is a series of mental events. The mental events do exist. The self that is supposed
to be thinking or feeling those mental events is a fiction.
Observation led physicists to their own view of the world. By studying gases, Robert Boyle concluded that
matter must be made of innumerable elementary particles, or atoms. The features of an object are due to the
features and to the motion of the particles that compose it.
Following Galileo's intuitions and adopting Boyle's atomistic view, Isaac Newton worked out a mathematical
description of the motion of bodies in space and over time. He posited an absolute time and an absolute space,
made of ordered instants and points. He assumed that forces can act at distance, and introduced an invisible
"gravitational force" as the cause of planetary motion. He thus unified terrestrial and celestial Mechanics: all
acceleration is caused by forces, the force that causes free fall being the gravitational force, that force being
also the same force that causes the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Forces act on masses, a mass being the
quantitative property that expressed Galileo’s inertia (the property of a material object to either remain at rest or
in a uniform motion in the absence of external forces). Philosophers had been speculating that the universe
might be a machine, but Newton did not just speculate: he wrote down the formulas.
Significant innovations were also introduced, for the first time in a long time, in Mathematics. Blaise Pascal
invented the mathematical theory of probability (and built the first mechanical adding machine). Leibniz
envisioned a universal language of logic (a "lingua characteristica") that would allow to derive all possible
knowledge simply by applying combinatorial rules of logic. Arabic numbers had been adopted in the 16th
century. Signs for addition, subtraction, multiplication were introduced by Francois Vieta. John Napier invented
logarithms. Descartes had developed analytical geometry, and Newton and Leibnitz independently developed
calculus.
It might not be a coincidence that a similar scientific, mathematical approach can be found in the great
composers of the era: Antonio Vivaldi, George-Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach.
The next big quantum leap in knowledge came with the "industrial" revolution. It is hard to pinpoint the birth
date of the industrial revolution (in 1721 Thomas Lombe built perhaps the first factory in the world, in 1741
Lewis Paul opened the first cotton mill, in 1757 James Watt improved the steam engine), but it is clear where it
happened: Manchester, England. That city benefited from a fortunate combination of factors: water mills, coal
mines, Liverpool's port and, last but not least, clock-making technology (the earliest factory mechanics were
clock-makers). These factors were all in the hands of the middle class, so it is not surprising that the middle
class (not the aristocracy or the government) ended up managing most of the enterprises.
The quantum leap in production translated into a quantum leap in transportation: in 1782 the first steamboat
sailed up the Clyde, in 1787 John Wilkinson built the first iron boat, in 1812 Henry Bell started the first
commercial steamboat service in Glasgow, in 1819 the "Savannah" completed the first transatlantic crossing by
a steamboat, in 1820 the first iron steamship was built, etc. By 1892 Britain's tonnage and sea-trade exceeds the
rest of the world together. ). At its peak, Britain had only 2% of the world's population, but produced almost
20% of the world's manufacturing output
One of the most tangible side-effects of the industrial revolution was the British Empire. There had been
"empires" before, and even larger ones (the Mongol empire). But never before had an empire stretched over so
many continents: Africa, America, Oceania, Asia. The Roman empire had viewed itself as an exporter of
"civilization" to the barbaric world, but the British Empire upped the ante by conceiving its imperialism as a
self-appointed mission to redeem the world. Its empire was a fantastic business venture, that exported people,
capital and goods, and created "world trade", not just regional trade. This enterprise was supported by a
military might that was largely due to financial responsibility at home. Despite the fact that France had a larger
population and more resources, Britain managed to defeat France in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-
1713), in the Seven Years' war (1756-1763) and in the Napoleonic wars (1795-1815.
Managing the British Empire was no easy task. One area that had to be vastly improved to manage a global
empire was the area of global communications: steamships, railroads, the telegraph, the first undersea cable and
a national post system unified the colonies as one nation. They created the first worldwide logistical system.
Coal, a key element in a country in which wood was scarce, generated additional momentum for the
improvement of shipbuilding technology and the invention of railroads (1825).
Other areas that the British Empire needed to standardize were finance and law. Thus the first economic and
legal systems that were global, not only regional, were born. British economic supremacy lasted until 1869,
when the first transcontinental railroad connecting the American prairies with the Atlantic Coast introduced a
new formidable competitor: the USA.
No wonder, thus, that Adam Smith felt a new discipline had to be created, one that studied the dynamics of a
complex economy based on the production and distribution of wealth. He explained the benefits of free
competition and free trade, and how competition can work for the common good (as an "invisible hand").
Jeremy Bentham (1789) introduced "utilitarian" criteria to decide what is good and what is bad: goodness is
what guarantees "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people". The philosophy of "utilitarianism"
was later perfected by John Stuart Mill, who wrote that "pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things
desirable as ends" thus implying that good is whatever promote pleasure and prevents pain
France was much slower in adopting the industrial revolution, and never came even close to matching the pace
of Britain industrialization, but the kingdom of the Bourbons went through a parallel "intellectual" revolution
that was no less radical and influential: "Les Lumieres", or the Enlightenment. It started in the salons of the
aristocracy, usually run by the ladies, and then it spread throughout the French society. The "philosophes"
believed, first and foremost, in the power of Reason and in Knowledge, as opposed to the religious and political
dogmas. They hailed progress and scorned conservative attitudes. The mood changed dramatically, as these
philosophers were able to openly say things that a century earlier would have been anathema. Scientific
discoveries (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton), the exploration of the world, the printing press and a religious
fatigue after so many religious wars led to cultural relativism: there are no dogmas, and only facts and logic
should determine opinions. So they questioned authority (Aristotle, the Bible) across the board. Charles de
Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau favored a purely rational religion and carried out
a moral crusade against intolerance, tyranny, superstition.
Julien LaMettrie was the ultimate materialist: he thought the mind is nothing but a machine (a computer,
basically) and thoughts are due to the physical processes of the brain. There is nothing special about a mind or
a life. Humans are just like all other animals.
Charles Bonnet speculated that the mind may not be able to influence the body, but might simply be a side-
effect of the brain ("epiphenomenalism").
Paul-Henri Holbach believed that humankind's miseries are mostly caused by religion and superstition, that
there is no God handing out rewards or punishment, that the soul dies when the body dies, that all phenomena
can be understood in terms of the features of matter.
Georges Buffon concocted the first western account of the history of life and of the Earth that was not based on
the Bible.
The American revolution (1776) was, ultimately, a practical application of the Enlightenment, a feasibility
study of the ideas of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution (1789-94) was a consequence of the new
political discourse, but also signaled an alliance between the rising bourgeoisie, the starving peasants and the
exploited workers. Its outcome was that the "nation" replaced "God" and "King": nationalism was born. By the
turn of the century, the Enlightenment had also fathered a series of utopian ideologies, from Charles Fourier's
phalanxes to Claude Saint-Simon's proto-socialism to Pierre Proudhon's anarchy.
In marked contrast with the British and French philosophers, the Germans developed a more "spiritual" and
less "materialistic" philosophy. The Germans were less interested in economy, society and politics, and much
more interested in explaining the universe and the human mind, what we are and what is the thing out there that
we perceive.
Immanuel Kant single-handedly framed the problem for future generations of philosophers. Noticing that the
mind cannot perceive reality as it is, he believed that phenomena exist only insofar as the mind turns
perceptions into ideas. The empirical world that appears to us is only a representation that takes place inside
our mind. Our mind builds that representation thanks to some a-priori knowledge in the form of categories
(such as space and time). These categories allow us to organize the chaotic flow of perceptions into an ordered
meaningful world. Knowledge consists in categorizing perceptions. In other words, Kant said that knowledge
depends on the structure of the mind.
Other German philosophers envisioned an even more "idealistic" philosophy.
Johann Fichte thought the natural world is construed by an infinite self as a challenge to itself and as a field in
which to operate. The Self needs the non-Self in order to be.
Peter Schelling believed in a fundamental underlying unity of nature, which led to view Nature as God, and to
deny the distinction between subject and object.
The spiritual theory of reality reached its apex with Georg-Wilhelm-Friedrich Hegel. He too believed in the
unity of nature, that only the absolute (infinite pure mind) exists, and that everything else is an illusion. He
proved it by noticing that every "thesis" has an "antithesis" that can be resolved at a higher level by a
"synthesis", and each synthesis becomes, in turns, a thesis with its own antithesis, which is resolved at a higher
level of synthesis, and so forth. This endless loop leads to higher and higher levels of abstraction. The limit of
this process is the synthesis of all syntheses: Hegel's absolute. Reality is the "dialectical" unfolding of the
absolute. Since we are part of the absolute as we develop our dialectical knowledge, it is, in a sense, the
absolute that is trying to know itself. We suffer because we are alienated from the absolute instead of being
united with it. Hegel applied the same "dialectical" method to history, believing that history is due to the
conflict of nations, conflicts that are resolved on a higher plane of political order.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1819) opened a new dimension to the "idealistic" discourse by arguing that a human
being is both a "knower" and a "willer". As knowers, humans experience the world "from without" (the
"cognitive" view). As free-willing beings, humans are also provided with a "view from within" (the "conative"
view). The knowing intellect can only scratch the surface of reality, while the will is able to grasp its essence.
Unfortunately, the will's constant urge for ever more knowledge and action causes human unhappiness: we are
victims of our insatiable will. In Buddhist-like fashion, Schopenhauer reasoned that the will is the origin of
humansufferings: the less one "wills", the less one suffers. Salvation can come through an "euthanasia of the
will".
Ludwig Feuerbach inverted Hegel's relationship between the individual and the Absolute and saw religion as a
way to project the human experience ("species being") into the concept of God.
Soren Kierkegaard (1846) saw philosophy and science as vain and pointless, because the thinker can never be a
detached, objective, external observer: the thinker is someone who exists and is part of what is observed.
Existence is both the thinker's object and condition. He thought that philosophers and scientists missed the
point. What truly matters is the pathos of existing, not the truth of Logic. Logic is defined by necessity, but
existence is dominated by possibility. Necessity is a feature of being, possibility is a feature of becoming. He
focused on the fact that existence is possibility, possibility means choice, and choice causes angst. We are
trapped in an "aut-aut", between the aesthetic being (whose life is paralyzed by multiple possibilities) and the
ethic being (whose life is committed to one choice). The only way out of the impasse is faith in God.
Inventions and discoveries of this age include Alessandro Volta's battery, a device that converts chemical
energy into electricity, John Dalton's theory that matter is made of atoms of differing weights. By taking
Newton to the letter, Pierre-Simon LaPlace argued that the future is fully determined: given the initial
conditions, every future event in the universe can be calculated. The primacy of empirical science
("positivism") was championed by Auguste Comte, who described the evolution of human civilization as three
stages, corresponding to three stages of the human mind: the theological stage (in which events are explained
by gods and kings rule); the abstract stage (in which events are explained by philosophy, and democracy rules);
and the scientific ("positive") stage (in which there is no absolute truth, but science provides generalizations
that can be applied to the real world).
Hermann von Helmholtz offered a detailed picture of how perception works, one that emphasized how an
unconscious process in the brain was responsible for turning sense data into thought and for mediating between
perception and action.
In Mathematics, George Boole resuscitated Leibniz's program of a "lingua characteristica" by applying

algebraic methods to a variety of fields. His idea was that the systematic use of symbols eliminated the
ambiguities of natural language. A number of mathematicians realized that the traditional (Euclidean) geometry
was not the only possible geometry. Joseph Fourier discovered that any periodic function can be decomposed
into since and cosine functions. Non-Euclidean geometries were developed by Carl-Friedrich Gauss, Nikolaj
Lobachevsky (1826), Janos Bolyai (1829) and Georg Riemann (1854). The latter realized that the flat space of
Euclidean geometry (the flat space used by Newton) was not necessarily the only possible kind of space: space
could be curved, and he developed a geometry for curved space (in which even a straight line is curved, by
definition). Each point of that space can be more or less curved, according to a "curvature tensor".
Somehow, the convergence of utopianism, idealism and positivism yielded Karl Marx's historical materialism.
Marx was fully aware that humans are natural beings who have to interact with nature (work) in order to
survive. Labor converts the raw materials of nature into the products that help humans survive. But in the
industrial society the difference between the time/cost of manufacturing a product versus the price that people
are willing to pay for it: had created a "surplus value" that was making the capitalist class richer and richer,
while hardly benefiting the working class at all. Marx set out to analyze the "alienation" caused to the working
class by the fact that producer and product had been separated. He envisioned the society of his time as divided
into two antagonistic classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And he envisioned the whole of human
history as a conflict not of nations but of classes. His remedy was socialism: all citizens should own the tools of
production. After socialism, the final stage of human history was to be communism: the: full equality of a
class-less society.
While human knowledge was expanding so rapidly, literature was entering the "romantic" age. The great poets
of the age were William Blake and William Wordsworth in England, Friedrich Hoelderlin and Johann-
Wolfgang Goethe in Germany, Giacomo Leopardi in Italy. With the exception of Carlo Goldoni's comedies in
Italy, theater was dominated by German drama: Gotthold-Ephraim Lessing in Germany), Friedrich von
Schiller, Georg Buchner. The novel became a genre of equal standing with poetry and theater via Goethe's
"Wilhelm Meister" (1796), Stendhal's "Le Rouge et Le Noir" (1830), Honore' de Balzac's "Le Pere Goriot"
(1834), Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" (1847), ), Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" (1851), Nikolaj
Gogol's "Dead Souls" (1852), Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" (1857), Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables"
(1862
While painting was relatively uneventful compared with the previous age, despite the originality of works such
as Francisco Goya's"Aquelarre" (1821) and Jean-Francois Millet's "The Gleaners" (1851), this was the age of
classical music, that boasted the geniuses of Wolfgang-Amadeus Mozart, Franz-Peter Schubert and Ludwig
Van Beethoven.
In the meantime, the world had become a European world. The partition of Africa (1885) had given Congo to
Belgium, Mozambique and Angola to Portugal, Namibia and Tanzania to Germany, Somalia to Italy, Western
Africa and Madagascar to France, and then Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Botswana to Britain. Then there were the "settler societies" created by the European immigrants
who displaced the natives: Canada, USA, Australia, South Africa. In subject societies such as India's (and, de
facto, China's), few Europeans ruled over huge masses of natives. The mixed-race societies of Latin America
were actually the least "European". There were fewer and shorter Intra-European wars but many more wars of
conquest elsewhere. Europeans controlled about 35% of the planet in 1800, 67% in 1878, 84% in 1914.
Japan was the notable exception. It had been the least "friendly" to the European traders, and it became the first
(and only) non-European civilization to "modernize" rapidly. In a sense, it became a "nation" in the European
sense of the word. It was also the first non-European nation to defeat a European power (Russia). No wonder
that the Japanese came to see themselves as the saviors of Asia: they were the only ones that had resisted
European colonization.
To ordinary people, the age of wars among the European powers seemed to be only a distant memory. The
world was becoming more homogeneous and less dangerous. One could travel from Cairo to Cape Town, from
Lisbon to Beijing carrying with minimal formalities. It was "globalization" on a scale never seen before and not
seen again for a century. Such a sense of security had not been felt since the days of the Roman empire,
although, invisible to most, this was also the age of a delirious arms race that the world never had seen before.
No wonder that European population increased dramatically at the end of the 19th century. In 30 years,
Germany's population grew by 43%, Austria-Hungary's by 35%, Britain's by 26%. A continuous flow of people
emigrated to the Americas.
After the French revolution, nationalism became the main factor of war. Wars were no longer feuds between
kings, they were conflicts between peoples. This also led to national aspirations by the European peoples who
did not have a country yet: notably Italians and Germans, who were finally united in 1861 and 1871 (but also
the Jews, who had to wait much longer for a homeland). Nationalism was fed by mass education (history,
geography, literature), which included, more or less subtly, the exaltation of the national past.
France lived its "Belle Epoque" (the 40 years of peace between 1871 and 1914). It was the age in which cafes
(i.e., the lower classes) replaced the salons (i.e., the higher classes) as the cultural centers. And this new kind of
cultural center witnessed an unprecedented convergence of sex, art and politics. Poetry turned towards
"Decadentism" and "Symbolism", movements pioneered by Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" (1857),
Isidore de Lautreamont's "Les Chants de Maldoror" (1868), Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre" (1871), Paul
Verlaine's "Romances sans Paroles" (1874) and Stephane Mallarme's "L'apres-midi d'un Faune" (1876).
Painters developed "Impressionism", which peaked with Claude Monet, and then "Cubism", which peaked with
Pablo Picasso, and, in between, original styles were pursued by Pierre Renoir, Georges Seurat, Henry
Rousseau, Paul Gaugin and Henri Matisse. France had most of the influential artistic movements of the time. In
the rest of Europe, painting relied on great individualities: Vincent van Gogh in Holland, Edvard Munch in
Norway, Gustav Klimt in Austria and Marc Chagall in Russia. French writers founded "Dadaism" (1916) and
"Surrealism" (1924), and an Italian in Paris founded "Futurism" (1909). They inherited the principle of the
"Philosophes": question authority and defy conventions, negate aesthetic and moral values. At the same time,
they reacted against the ideological values of the Enlightenment itself: Dadaism exalted irrationality,
Surrealism was fascinated by dreams, Futurism worshipped machines.
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Berlin, in the meantime, had become not only the capital of a united Germany but also the capital of electricity.
Germany's pace of industrialization had been frantic. Werner Von Siemens founded Siemens in 1847. In 1866
that company invented the first practical dynamo. In 1879 Siemens demonstrated the first electric railway and
In 1881 it demonstrated the first electric tram system. In 1887 Emil Rathenau founded Siemens' main
competitor, the Algemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft (AEG), specializing in electrical engineering, whereas
Siemens was specializing in communication and information. In1890 AEG developed the alternating-current
motor (invented in the USA by Nikola Tesla) and the generator, which allowed to build the first power plants:
alternating current made it easier to transmit electricity over long distances. In 1910, Berlin was the greatest
center of electrical production in the world Germany's industrial output had passed from France's (in 1875) and
Britain's (in 1900). Berlin was becoming a megalopolis, as its population grew from 1.9 million in 1890 to 3
million in 1910.
Electricity changed the daily lives of millions of people, mainly in the USA, because it enabled the advent of
appliances, for example Josephine Cochrane's dishwasher (1886), Willis Carrier's air conditioner (1902), and
General Electric's commercial refrigerator (1911). Life in the office also changed dramatically. First (in 1868)
Christopher Latham Sholes introduced a practical typewriter that changed the concept of corresponding, and
then (in 1885) William Burroughs introduced an adding machine that changed the concept of accounting.
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Progress in transportation continued with Daimler and Maybach's motorcycle (1885), Karl Benz's gasoline-
powered car (1886), Ferdinand von Zeppelin's rigid dirigibile (1900), and Wilbur and Orville Wright's airplane
(1903). But, more importantly, the USA introduced a new kind of transportation, not physical (of people) but
virtual (of information). The age of communications was born with Samuel Morse's telegraph (1844),
Alexander Bell's telephone (1876), Thomas Edison's phonograph (1877), Kodak's first consumer camera
(1886). Just like Louis Daguerre had invented the "daguerrotype" in 1839, but his invention had been improved
mainly in the USA, so the Lumiere brothers invented cinema (in 1895) but the new invention soon became an
American phenomenon. The most dramatic of these events was perhaps Guglielmo Marconi's transatlantic
radio transmission of 1901, when the world seemed to shrink.
"Creationist" views of the world had already been attacked in France by the "philosophes". In the age of
Progress, a new, much more scientific attack, came from Britain.
Herbert Spencer attempted a synthesis of human knowledge that led him to posit the formation of order as a
pervasive feature of the universe. Basically, the universe is "programmed" to evolve towards more and more
complex states. In particular, living matter continuously evolves. The fittest forms of life survive. Human
progress (wealth, power) results from a similar survival of more advanced individuals, organizations, societies
and cultures over their inferior competitors
Charles Darwin explained how animals evolved: through the combination of two processes, one of variation
(the fact that children are not identical to the parents, and are not identical to each other) and selection (the fact
that only some of the children survive). The indirect consequence of these two processes is "adaptation",
whereby species tend to evolve towards the configuration that can best cope with the environment. The
"struggle for survival" became one of the fundamental laws of life. In a sense, Darwin had merely transferred
Adam Smith's economics to biology. But he had also introduced an important new paradigm: "design without a
designer ". Nature can create amazingly complex and efficient organisms without any need for a "designer"
(whether human or divine). Humans are used to the idea that someone designs, and then builds, an artifact. A
solution to a problem requires some planning. But Darwin showed that Nature uses a different paradigm: it lets
species evolve through the combined forces of variation and selection, and the result is a very efficient solution
to the problem (survival). No design and no planning are necessary. It was more than a theory of evolution: it
was a new way of thinking, that was immediately applied to economics, sociology, history, etc.
Ernst Haeckel argued that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny": the development of the body in the individual
of a species (or ontogeny) summarizes the evolutionary development of that species (phylogeny).
Muito menos divulgado, mas não menos dramático, foi a descoberta de Gregor Mendel. Ele começou a explicar
por que as crianças não herdam a média dos traços de seus pais (por exemplo, uma cor entre os olhos negros da
mãe e os olhos azuis do pai), mas apenas a característica de um ou outro (preto). ou olhos azuis). Ele
apresentou uma explicação simples, mas, mais uma vez, revolucionária: há unidades de transmissão de
características (que hoje chamamos de "genes"), e uma delas não combina uma combinação matemática dos
traços de seus pais, mas uma ou outra unidade. Mendel introduziu uma distinção importante: o "genótipo"
(como o programa que determina como um organismo se parece) versus "o fenótipo" (a aparência do
organismo).
Progresso semelhante estava acontecendo no estudo da mente humana. Paul Broca estudou lesões cerebrais
para entender a estrutura do cérebro e como ele determina o comportamento humano e a personalidade.
A aceleração na Física foi dramática desde a unificação da Mecânica terrestre e celestial de Newton, mas a era
do vapor e da energia elétrica introduziu as primeiras tensões em suas fundações. Em 1824, Sadi Carnot
elaborou uma ciência preliminar de calor, ou termodinâmica, e, em 1864, James Clerk Maxwell unificou
eletricidade e magnetismo, fundando assim o eletromagnetismo. Em 1887, Heinrich Herz descobriu as ondas
de rádio e, em 1895, Wilhelm-Conrad Roentgen descobriu os raios X. A física de Newton não foi projetada
para esses fenômenos.
Em 1896, a radioatividade foi descoberta e levou os físicos a acreditar que o átomo não era indivisível, que
tinha sua própria estrutura. Em 1900, Max Planck inventou a Teoria Quântica afirmando que a energia só pode
ser transmitida em "quanta" discretos. Em 1905 Albert Einstein publicou "A Teoria Especial da Relatividade".
Em 1911, Ernest Rutherford mostrou como o átomo é feito de um núcleo e de elétrons em órbita.
A Física de Newton via o mundo como um sistema estático e reversível que não sofre evolução, cuja
informação é constante no tempo. A física de Newton era a ciência do ser. Mas sua Física não foi muito útil
para entender o mundo das máquinas, um mundo dinâmico de se tornar. A termodinâmica descreve um mundo
em evolução no qual processos irreversíveis ocorrem: algo muda e nunca pode ser desfeito. Termodinâmica foi
a ciência do devir. A ciência do ser e a ciência do devir descrevem aspectos duais da natureza. A
termodinâmica nasceu para estudar os gases: sistemas feitos de uma miríade de pequenas partículas em
movimento frenético. Física de Newton exigiria uma equação dinâmica para cada um deles, o que não é viável.
A termodinâmica descreve um sistema macroscópico por propriedades globais (como temperatura, pressão,
volume). As propriedades globais são devidas ao movimento de suas partículas (por exemplo, temperatura é a
energia cinética média das moléculas de um sistema). Eles são fundamentalmente estocásticos, o que implica
que o mesmo macroestado pode ser realizado por diferentes microestados (por exemplo, um gás pode ter a
mesma temperatura em diferentes pontos no tempo, mesmo que seu status interno esteja mudando o tempo
todo). Sadi Carnot percebeu que uma máquina de "movimento perpétuo" não era possível: não é possível
converter continuamente a energia de uma forma para outra e vice-versa. A razão é que qualquer transformação
de energia tem um "custo" que veio a ser chamado de "entropia". Essa quantidade tornou-se a real estranheza
da termodinâmica. Tudo o mais foi devido a uma visão de um sistema complexo estocástico (em oposição à
visão determinista de Newton de um sistema simples), mas a entropia era um novo conceito, que incorporava
uma característica fundamental do nosso universo: as coisas decaem e alguns processos não são reversíveis. O
calor flui espontaneamente de corpos quentes para corpos frios, mas o oposto nunca ocorre. Você pode
dissolver um pedaço de açúcar em uma xícara de café, mas, uma vez dissolvido, você nunca poderá trazê-lo de
volta. Você pode calcular a quantidade de açúcar, sua temperatura e muitas outras propriedades, mas não pode
trazê-lo de volta. Alguns acontecimentos não podem ser desfeitos. A segunda lei da termodinâmica afirma que
a entropia (de um sistema isolado) nunca pode diminuir. É uma característica deste universo que os processos
naturais gerem "entropia". Isso se traduz em uma fórmula que não é uma igualdade. Física de Newton foi
construída sobre o sinal de igual (algo é igual a outra coisa).
Ludwig Boltzmann interpretou a entropia como uma medida de desordem em um sistema. Ele ofereceu uma
definição estatística de entropia: a entropia de um macroestado é o logaritmo do número de seus microestados.
A entropia mede o próprio fato de que muitos estados microscópicos diferentes de um sistema podem resultar
no mesmo estado macroscópico. Pode-se interpretar este fato como "o quão desordenado é o sistema". Esta
interpretação combinada com a segunda lei da termodinâmica levou ao medo de uma "desgraça eterna": o
universo deve evoluir na direção da entropia superior e superior, para o estado de máxima entropia, que é a
desordem absoluta, ou o "calor". morte".
O eletromagnetismo de Maxwell introduziu outra mudança de paradigma: o conceito de campo (pioneiro de

Michael Faraday). Maxwell provou que a eletricidade e o magnetismo, aparentemente relacionados a
fenômenos diferentes, são, na realidade, o mesmo fenômeno. Dependendo das circunstâncias, pode-se
testemunhar apenas o lado elétrico ou apenas o lado magnético das coisas, mas elas realmente coexistem o
tempo todo. A força elétrica é criada por mudanças no campo magnético. A força magnética é criada por
mudanças no campo elétrico. A estranheza era que a expressão matemática dessas relações entre forças
elétricas e magnéticas se revelou "equações de campo", equações que descreviam não o movimento das
partículas, mas o comportamento dos campos. Os campos são gerados por ondas que irradiam através do
espaço. A gravitação não era mais o único exemplo de ação à distância: assim como havia um "campo
gravitacional" associado a qualquer massa, havia um campo "eletromagnético" em qualquer carga elétrica. A
luz em si mostrou ser composta de ondas eletromagnéticas.
Ernst Mach era outro físico influente que tinha uma poderosa intuição. Ele previu a inércia de um corpo (a
tendência de um corpo em repouso para permanecer em repouso e de um corpo em movimento para continuar
se movendo na mesma direção) como a consequência de uma relação daquele corpo com o resto da matéria no
universo. Basicamente, ele pensava que cada corpo no universo interage com todos os outros corpos no
universo, mesmo em distâncias gigantescas, e sua inércia é a soma dessas interações miríades.
A última das principais ideias em Física Antes da Relatividade veio de Henri Poincaré, pioneiro da teoria do
"caos" quando apontou que uma ligeira mudança nas condições iniciais de algumas equações resulta em
diferenças em larga escala. Alguns sistemas vivem "no limite": uma ligeira mudança nas condições iniciais
pode ter efeitos catastróficos em seu comportamento.
A liderança intelectual, porém, estava passando para os matemáticos.
Ao inventar a "teoria dos conjuntos", Georg Cantor emancipou a matemática do seu domínio tradicional
(números). Ele também introduziu "números" para lidar com quantidades infinitas (números "transfinitos")
porque percebeu que espaço e tempo são feitos de pontos infinitos, e que, entre quaisquer dois pontos, existe
sempre um número infinito de pontos. No entanto, uma série infinita de números pode ter uma soma finita.
Afinal, essas eram as mesmas noções que, séculos antes de Cantor, intrigaram Zeno. Cantor deu-lhes
legitimidade matemática.
Gottlob Frege (1884) pretendia remover a intuição da aritmética. Assim, ele estabeleceu, assim como Leibniz e
Boole antes dele, a substituição da linguagem natural pela linguagem da lógica, o "cálculo de predicados".
Estendendo o programa de Cantor, Frege transformou a própria Matemática em um ramo da lógica: usando os
"conjuntos" de Cantor, ele reconstruiu os números cardinais por um método puramente lógico que não
dependia da intuição.
Frege percebeu que Logic era sobre a "sintaxe", não a "semântica" das proposições. Uma expressão tem um
"sentido" (ou intenção) e "uma referência" (ou extensão): "vermelho" é a palavra para o conceito de
vermelhidão e a palavra para todas as coisas que são vermelhas. Em alguns casos, expressões com sentidos
diferentes têm o mesmo referente. Por exemplo, "a estrela da manhã" e "a estrela da noite", que se referem a
Vênus. Em particular, as proposições da lógica podem ter muitos sentidos, mas têm apenas um dos dois
referentes: verdadeiro ou falso.
Giuseppe Peano estava seguindo um programa similar ao mesmo tempo, uma "axiomatização" da teoria dos
números naturais.
Charles Peirce deu uma definição pragmática de "verdade": algo é verdadeiro se pode ser usado e validado.
Assim, a verdade é definida por consenso. A verdade não é concordar com a realidade, é um acordo entre os
seres humanos. A verdade é "verdade suficiente". A verdade não é eterna. A verdade é um processo, um
processo de auto-verificação. Em geral, ele acreditava que um objeto é definido pelos efeitos de seu uso: uma
definição que funciona bem é uma boa definição. Um objeto "é" seu comportamento. O significado de um
conceito consiste em seus efeitos práticos em nossas vidas diárias: se duas ideias têm os mesmos efeitos
práticos em nós, elas têm o mesmo significado.
Peirce estava, portanto, mais interessado em "crenças" do que em "verdades". As crenças levam a hábitos que
são reforçados pela experiência. Ele viu que o processo de criação de hábito é penetrante na natureza: pode-se
dizer que toda a matéria adquire hábitos, exceto que as "crenças" da matéria inerte foram fixadas na medida em
que não podem mais ser modificadas. O hábito é, em última análise, o que faz dos objetos o que eles são. É
também o que nos faz o que somos: eu sou meus hábitos. Hábitos estão progressivamente removendo o acaso
do universo. O universo está evoluindo de um caos original em que o acaso prevaleceu e não havia hábitos para
uma ordem absoluta em que todos os hábitos foram fixados.
Ao mesmo tempo, Peirce percebeu que a teoria de sentido e referente de Frege era limitada. Peirce introduziu a
primeira versão da "semiótica" que se concentrava nos sinais. Um índice é um sinal que tem uma relação causal
com seu referente (por exemplo, cigarros "significa" que alguém estava na sala). Um ícone é um sinal que tem
uma relação de similaridade com seu referente (por exemplo, a imagem de um carro refere-se ao carro). Um
símbolo é um sinal que tem uma relação com seu referente que é puramente convencional (por exemplo, as
letras "carro" referem-se a um carro). Um sinal refere-se a um objeto somente através da mediação de outros
signos (ou "interpretantes"). Há uma regressão infinita de interpretantes do significante (o signo) para o
significado (o referente). Um dicionário define uma palavra em termos de outras palavras, que são definidas em
termos de outras palavras, que são definidas em termos de outras palavras e assim por diante. Peirce acreditava
que o conhecimento é "semiose" (fazer sinais) e a semiose é um processo sem fim.
A filosofia estava menos interessada na lógica e mais interessada na condição humana, a direção
"existencialista" que Schopenhauer e Kierkegaard haviam inaugurado.
Friedrich Nietzsche acreditava que os seres humanos são movidos pela "vontade de poder", um desejo
irresistível de ordenar o curso das experiências de alguém (uma extensão da vontade de viver de
Schopenhauer). Todos os seres vivos lutam por uma ordem mais elevada de sua condição de vida para superar
as limitações do seu estado atual. As limitações humanas são exemplificadas pela ciência: a ciência é apenas
uma interpretação do mundo. Verdade e conhecimento são apenas relativos a quão úteis eles são para nossa
"vontade de poder". Ele via a moralidade cristã como um dispositivo inventado pelos fracos para afirmar sua
vontade de poder sobre os fortes, uma "moralidade escrava". Ele acreditava que os valores cristãos se tornaram
obsoletos ("Deus está morto") e defendeu uma nova moralidade fundada no ideal do "super-homem",
Henri Bergson foi, ao contrário, um filósofo muito espiritual, para quem a realidade era apenas o fluxo eterno
de um todo panteístico. Esse fluxo tem duas direções: o fluxo ascendente é a vida, o fluxo descendente é
matéria inerte. Os seres humanos estão divididos entre o Intelecto e a Intuição: O Intelecto é a vida que observa
a matéria inerte (no espaço), enquanto a Intuição é a vida que observa a vida (no tempo). O intelecto pode
"entender" a matéria inerte, não apenas a intuição pode "agarrar" a vida. Para entender a matéria, o Intelecto
divide-a em objetos localizados no espaço. A intuição, ao contrário, compreende o fluxo da vida como um todo
no tempo.
Francis-Herbert Bradley foi o último grande "idealista". Ele argumentou que todas as categorias da ciência (por
exemplo, espaço e tempo) podem ser provadas como contraditórias, o que prova que o mundo é uma ficção, um
produto da mente. A única realidade tem que ser uma unidade de todas as coisas, o absoluto.
Inevitavelmente, o foco do conhecimento mudou para a psique.
William James adaptou o "pragmatismo" de Peirce ao reino da mente. Ele acreditava que a função da mente é
ajudar o corpo a viver em um ambiente, como qualquer outro órgão. O cérebro é um órgão que evoluiu devido
à sua utilidade para a sobrevivência. O cérebro é organizado como uma rede associativa, e as associações são
governadas por uma regra de reforço, de modo que cria "hábitos" fora das regularidades (padrões de estímulo-
resposta). Um hábito é reforçado à medida que é bem sucedido. A função do pensamento é pragmática:
produzir hábitos de ação. James ficou intrigado com o fato de que o cérebro, ao fazê-lo, também produzia
"consciência", mas achava que a vida mental não é uma substância, é um processo ("o fluxo da consciência").
Edward Thorndike postulou a "lei do efeito": os animais aprendem com base no resultado de suas ações. Ele
imaginou o cérebro como uma rede: o aprendizado ocorre quando os elementos estão conectados. O
comportamento é devido à associação de estímulos com respostas geradas por essas conexões. Um hábito é
uma cadeia de pares de "estímulo-resposta".
Wilhelm-Max Wundt havia fundado a psicologia para estudar a psique por meio de experimentos e lógica, e
não mera especulação. O modelo clássico de psicologia era mais ou menos isso. Ações têm um motivo.
Motivos estão alojados em nossas mentes e controlados por nossas mentes. Motivos expressam um
desequilíbrio entre desejo e realidade que a mente tenta remediar mudando a realidade através da ação. Uma
ação, portanto, destina-se a restaurar o equilíbrio entre a realidade e nossos desejos. Mas e os sonhos?
Sigmund Freud was less revolutionary than he seemed to be, because, in principle, he simply applied the
classical model of Psychology. He decided that dreams have a motive, that those motives are in the mind, and
that they are meant to remedy an imbalance. Except that the motives of dreams are not conscious: the mind
contains both conscious motives and unconscious motives. There is a repertory of motives that our mind,
independent of our will, has created over the years, and they participate daily in determining our actions.
Freud's revolution was in separating motive and awareness. A dream is only apparently meaningless: it is
meaningless if interpreted from the conscious motives. But the dream is perfectly logical if one considers also
the unconscious motives. The meaning of dreams are hidden and reflect memories of emotionally meaningful
experience. Dreams are not prophecies, as ancient oracles believed, but hidden memories. Psychoanalysis was
the discipline invented by Freud to sort out the unconscious mess.
Freud divided the self in different parts that coexist. The ego perceives, learns and acts consciously. The super-
ego is the (largely unconscious) moral conscience which was created during childhood by parental guidance as
an instrument of self-repression The id is the repertory of unconscious memories created by "libido".
Somewhat unnecessarily, Freud painted a repulsive picture of the human soul. He believed that the main
motive was "libido" (sexual desires) and that a child is, first and foremost, a sexual being. As parents repress
the child's sexuality, the child undergoes oral, anal and phallic stages. Boys desire sex with their mother and are
afraid their father wants to castrate them. Girls envy the penis and are attracted to their father. And so forth.
Carl Jung shifted the focus towards a different kind of unconscious, the collective unconscious. He saw motives
not so much in the history of the individual as in the history of the entire human race. His unconscious is a
repertory of motives created over the millennia and shared by all humakind. Its "archetypes" spontaneously
emerge in all minds. All human brains are "wired" to create some myths rather than others. Thus mythology is
the key to understanding the human mind, because myths are precisely the keys to unlock those motives.
Dreams reflect this collective unconscious, and therefore connect the individual with the rest of humankind and
its archaic past. For Jung, the goal of Psychoanalysis is a spiritual renewal through the mystical connection
with our primitive ancestors.
Another discipline invented at the turn of the century was Hermeneutics. Wilhelm Dilthey argued that human
knowledge can only be understood by placing the knower's life in its historical context. Understanding a text
implies understanding the relationship between the author and its age. This applies in general to all cultural
products, because they are all analogous to written texts.
Ferdinand Saussure was the father of "Structuralism". The meaning of any human phenomenon (e.g, language)
lies the network of relationships that it is part of. A sign is meaningful only within the entire network of signs,
and the meaning of a sign "is" its relationship to other signs. Language is a system of signs having no reference
to anything outside itself. He also separated "parole" (a specific utterance in a language, or a speaker's
performance) from "langue" (the entire body of the language, or a speaker's competence), thus laying the
foundations for Linguistics.
Edmund Husserl's aim was to found "Phenomenology", the science of phenomena. He believed that the essence
of events is not their physical description provided by science, but the way we experience them. In fact, science
caused a crisis by denying humans the truth of what they experience, by moving away from phenomena as they
are. He pointed out that consciousness is "consciousness of": it correlates the act of knowing ("noesis") of the
subject and the object that is known ("noema"). The self knows a phenomenon "intuitively". The essence
("eidos") of a phenomenon is the sum of all possible "intuitive" ways of knowing that phenomenon. The eidos
can be achieve only after "bracketing out" the physical description of the phenomenon, only after removing the
pollution of science from the human experience, so that the self can experience a purely transcendental
knowledge of the phenomenon. This would restore the unity of subject and object that science separated.
In Physics, a number of ideas were converging towards the same view of the world. Henri Poincare` showed
that the speed of light has to be the maximum speed and that mass depends on speed. Hendrik Lorentz unified
Newton's equations for the dynamics of bodies and Maxwell's equations for the dynamics of electromagnetic
waves in one set of equations, the "Lorentz transformations". These equations, which were hard to dispute
because both Newton's and Maxwell's theories were confirmed by countless experiments, contained a couple of
odd implications: bodies seemed to contract with speed, while clocks seemed to slow down.
Albert Einstein devised an elegant unification of all these ideas that matched, in scope, the one provided two
centuries earlier by Newton. He used strict logic. His axioms were that the laws of nature must be uniform, that
those laws must be the same in all frames of reference that are "inertial" (at rest or moving of linear uniform
motion), and that the speed of light was the same in all directions. He took the oddities of the Lorentz
transformations literally: length and duration appear different to different observers, depending on their state of
motion, because space and time are relative. "Now" and "here" became meaningless concepts. The implications
of his axioms were even more powerful. All physical quantities were now expressed in four dimensions, a time
component and a three-dimensional space component. One, in particular, represented both energy and
momentum, depending on the space-time coordinate that one examined. It also yield the equivalence between
mass and energy (E=mc2). Time does not flow (no more than space does): it is just a dimension. A life is a
series of points in space-time, points that have both a spatial and a temporal component.
Einstein's world was still Newton's world, though, in some fundamental ways. For example, it was
deterministic: the past determines the future. There was one major limitation: because nothing can travel faster
than light, there is a limit to what can happen in one's life. Each observer's history is constrained by a cone of
light within the space-time continuum radiating from the point (space and time) where the observer "is".
O próximo passo de Einstein foi procurar uma ciência que não se limitasse a sistemas "inerciais". Ele
acreditava que os fenômenos deveriam parecer os mesmos para todos os sistemas acelerados em relação uns
aos outros. Suas novas fórmulas tiveram novas implicações surpreendentes. A dinâmica do universo foi
reduzida à interação entre as massas e a geometria do espaço-tempo: a curva de massa espaço-tempo, e a
curvatura do espaço-tempo determina como as massas se movem. O espaço-tempo é deformado por todas as
massas com que é cravejado. Todo objeto deixado para si se move ao longo de uma "geodésica" do espaço-
tempo (a rota mais curta entre dois pontos na superfície deformada do espaço-tempo). Acontece que o espaço-
tempo é deformado e, portanto, os objetos parecem ser "atraídos" pelos objetos no espaço-tempo que o
distorceram. Mas cada objeto está simplesmente se movendo em uma geodésica (o equivalente a uma linha reta
no espaço "plano" tradicional). É o espaço-tempo que é curvado, não a geodésica (a trajetória) do corpo. O
espaço-tempo "é" o campo gravitacional. Einstein reduziu assim a física à geometria. A curvatura do espaço-
tempo é medida por um "tensor de curvatura" (como na geometria de Riemann) tal que cada ponto no espaço-
tempo é descrito por dez números (o "tensor métrico"). Se o tensor métrico é reduzido a curvatura zero, obtém-
se a física tradicional no espaço plano tradicional. Curvatura (isto é, um campo gravitacional) também faz com
que os relógios desacelerem e acendam para serem desviados. O espaço-tempo "é" o campo gravitacional.
Einstein reduziu assim a física à geometria. A curvatura do espaço-tempo é medida por um "tensor de
curvatura" (como na geometria de Riemann) tal que cada ponto no espaço-tempo é descrito por dez números (o
"tensor métrico"). Se o tensor métrico é reduzido a curvatura zero, obtém-se a física tradicional no espaço
plano tradicional. Curvatura (isto é, um campo gravitacional) também faz com que os relógios desacelerem e
acendam para serem desviados. O espaço-tempo "é" o campo gravitacional. Einstein reduziu assim a física à
geometria. A curvatura do espaço-tempo é medida por um "tensor de curvatura" (como na geometria de
Riemann) tal que cada ponto no espaço-tempo é descrito por dez números (o "tensor métrico"). Se o tensor
métrico é reduzido a curvatura zero, obtém-se a física tradicional no espaço plano tradicional. Curvatura (isto é,
um campo gravitacional) também faz com que os relógios desacelerem e acendam para serem desviados.
Obtém-se a física tradicional no espaço plano tradicional. Curvatura (isto é, um campo gravitacional) também
faz com que os relógios desacelerem e acendam para serem desviados. Obtém-se a física tradicional no espaço
plano tradicional. Curvatura (isto é, um campo gravitacional) também faz com que os relógios desacelerem e
acendam para serem desviados.
Surpreendentemente, a relatividade de Einstein, que concedeu um status especial ao observador, reabriu as

portas para a espiritualidade oriental. Nishida Kitaro foi talvez o mais ilustre filósofo oriental a tentar uma
unificação da ciência ocidental e do zen-budismo. No sistema de Kitaro, a ciência ocidental é como um robô
sem sentimentos ou ética que fornece as bases racionais para a vida, enquanto o Zen fornece os sentimentos e a
ética. "Mu" é o momento imensurável no espaço-tempo ("menos de um momento") que tem que ser "vivido"
para alcançar o próximo "mu". O fluxo de "mu" cria uma topologia espaço-temporal. A breve presença
infinitesemal de Mu cria passado, presente e futuro. O "eterno agora" contém todo o nosso ser e também o ser
de todas as outras coisas. O presente é meramente um aspecto do eterno. O eterno gera todo o tempo um
presente. Mu também cria autoconsciência e livre arbítrio. Há uma unidade fundamental do universo, em
particular entre o eu e o mundo. Cada eu e cada coisa são expressões da mesma realidade, Deus. O eu não é
uma substância: é o nada ("estudar o eu é esquecer o eu"). Religião, não ciência, é a culminação do
conhecimento. É também o culminar do amor.
Os países europeus (e pelo menos duas de suas ex-colônias, o Brasil e os EUA) experimentaram um boom sem
precedentes na literatura. Os grandes romances da época se expandiram sobre os gêneros inventados pelas
gerações anteriores: "Guerra e paz" de Leo Tolstoj (1869), "Middlemarch" de George Eliot (1872),
"L'Assommoir" de Emile Zola (1877), "Fodor Dostoevsky" Irmãos Karamazov "(1880)," Memorias Postumas
"de Joaquim-Maria Machado de Assis (1881)," A Rebours "de Joris Huysmans (1884)," Tristana "de Perez
Galdos (1892), José-Maria Eca de Queiros "Casa de Ramires" (1897), "Buddenbrooks" de Thomas Mann
(1901), Golden Bowl de Henry James (1904), "Il Fu Mattia Pascal" de Luigi Pirandello (1904), Joseph Conrad '
O teatro foi largamente reinventado tanto como realista como fantástico através de "Wild Duck" de Henrik
Ibsen (1884), "Ubu Roi" de Alfred Jarry (1894), "The Dream" de August Strindberg (1902), "The Cherries
Garden" de Anton Chekhov "(1904)," The Weavers "de Gerhart Hauptmann (1892)," Reigen "de Arthur
Schnitzler (1896)," O Livro de Pandora "de Frank Wedekind (1904)," Pigmalião "de Bernard Shaw (1914).
A poesia funciona fora dos "ismos" da França, desde "O Anel e o Livro" (1869), de Robert Browning, até
"Naufrágio da Alemanha", de Gerald-Manley Hopkins (1876), de "Prosas Profanas" (1896) a Ruben Dario.
"Canti di Castelvecchio" de Giovanni Pascoli (1903), de "Campos de Castilla" (1912) de Antonio Machado a
"Gitanjali" de Rabindranath Tagore (1913). No novo século, a França ainda liderava o caminho da moda
literária com "Alcools" de Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) e "La Jeune Parque" de Paul Valery (1917).
A música clássica refletia o espírito nacionalista da época (Richard Wagner na Alemanha, Hector Berlioz na
França, Modest Moussorgsky na Rússia, Giuseppe Verdi na Itália, Antonin Dvorak na República Tcheca,
Fryderyk Chopin na Polônia, Ferencz Liszt na Hungria) e o impacto das sinfonias de Beethoven no mundo de
fala alemã (Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Joseph Bruckner e Gustav Mahler).
No início do novo século, várias composições anunciaram que o formato clássico estava prestes a esgotar sua
missão: "Poema Divino" de Aleksandr Skrjabin (1905), "Pierrot Lunaire" de Arnold Schoenberg (1912), "Jeux"
de Claude Debussy ( 1912), "Le Sacre du Printemps" (1913) de Igor Stravinskij, "Symphony 4" (1916) de
Charles Ives, "Sinfonia Clássica" de Sergej Prokofev (1917) e "Sócrates" de Erik Satie (1918).
Todo o progresso na Ciência, Filosofia e Artes não ajudou a evitar uma nova guerra internacional, uma tão
grande que foi chamada de "guerra mundial". Suas causas imediatas (1914) foram insignificantes. As causas
reais eram as próprias "nações". O espírito nacionalista causou o confronto, e o confronto causou uma enorme
corrida armamentista, e essa corrida transformou cada nação européia em uma máquina de guerra formidável.
Os soldados foram transportados por navio de guerra, submarino, zepelim, avião de combate, trem, carro e
tanque. Inimigos foram mortos com granadas, canhões, metralhadoras, torpedos, bombas. 60 milhões de
homens foram mobilizados. 8 milhões morreram. Sérvia, Rússia, França, Grã-Bretanha, Japão, Canadá,
Austrália, Itália (1915), China (1917) e EUA (1917) venceram contra a Áustria, Alemanha e Turquia. A Rússia
foi aliada com os vencedores
A era do pós-guerra começou com três novos "ismos" políticos: o comunismo de Vladimir Ilic Lenin (1917), o
fascismo de Benito Mussolini (1922) e o nazismo de Adolf Hitler (1933). Mussolini e Hitler capitalizaram o
espírito nacionalista das duas nações mais jovens da Europa. A revolução russa foi duas revoluções em uma. O
primeiro (em fevereiro) foi causado por escassez de alimentos e envolveu mulheres, trabalhadores e soldados.
O segundo (em outubro) foi na realidade um golpe do Partido Bolchevique de Lênin, determinado a aplicar o
programa de "revolução permanente" de Leon Trotsky (ignorar a sociedade democrático-burguesa e apontar
diretamente para a ditadura do proletariado). Lenin inaugurou uma economia coletivista apoiada por um
aparato terrorista. Lenin foi sucedido por Joseph Stalin, sob cujo domínio o marxismo-leninismo tornou-se o
eufemismo para uma burocracia vasta, generalizada e centralizada encarregada de todos os aspectos da vida (o
sistema "nomenklatura"). O objetivo comunista exigia a mobilização de todos os recursos humanos e materiais
para gerar poder econômico que garantisse poder político e militar.
The three "isms" had something in common, besides the totalitarian regime: they soon became ideologies of
mass murder. Lenin's was scientific, with the goal to create absolute dictatorship (of the proletariat) via
absolute violence; Stalin's was political, to safeguard and increase his own power; Hitler's was racist, to
annihilate inferior races; Mao's was idealist, to create a just society.
But they did not invent genocide: 2.4 million Chinese died in the 1911 revolution and 2 million would die in
the civil war of 1928-1937, the Ottoman empire slaughtered 1.2 million Armenians in 1915, World War I killed
8 million soldiers. Britain had already experimented on concentration camps in the Boer war (1899-02).
However, the numbers escalated with the new ideologies of mass murder: Lenin's "revolution" killed 5 million;
Stalin's purges of 1936-37 killed 13 million; World War 2 killed 55 million, of which millions in Hitler's gas
chambers; Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (1958-1961) caused the death of perhaps 30 million and his "cultural
revolution" (1966-1969) caused the death of perhaps 11 million.
In the meantime, Physics was still in a fluctuating state.
Niels Bohr (1913) showed that electrons are arranged in concentric shells outside the nucleus of the atom, with
the number of electrons determining the atomic number of the atom and the outermost shell of electrons
determining its chemical behavior. Paul Rutherford (1919) showed that the nucleus of the atom contains
positively charged particles (protons) in equal number to the number of electrons. In 1932 James Chadwick
showed that the nucleus of the atom contains electrically neutral particles (neutrons): isotopes are atoms of the
same element (containing the same number of electrons/protons) but with different numbers of neutrons. Their
model of the atom was another case of Nature preferring only discrete values instead of all possible values.
(Max Planck had shown in 1900 that atoms can emit energy only in discrete amounts).
At this point, Physics was aware of three fundamental forces: the electromagnetic force, the gravitational force
and now the nuclear force.
The theory that developed from these discoveries was labeled "Quantum Mechanics". It was born to explain
why Nature prefers some "quanta" instead of all possible values. Forces are due to exchanges of discrete
amounts of energy ("quanta").
The key intuition came in 1923, when Louis DeBroglie argued that matter can be viewed both as particles and
waves: they are dual aspects of the same reality..This also explained the energy-frequency equivalence
discovered by Albert Einstein in 1905: the energy of a photon is proportional to the frequency of the radiation.
Max Born realized (1926) that the "wave" corresponding to a particle was a wave of probabilities, it was a
representation of the state of the particle. Unlike a pointless particle, a wave can be in several places at the
same time. The implication was that the state of a particle was not a specific value, but a range of values. A
"wave function" specifies the values that a certain quantity can assume, and, in a sense, states that the quantity
"has" all those values (e.g., the particle "is" in all the places compatible with its wave function). The "wave
function" summarizes ("superposes") all the possible alternatives. Erwin Schroedinger's equation describes how
this wave function evolves in time, just like Newton's equations describe how a classical physical quantity
evolves in time. The difference is that, at every point in time, Schroedinger's equation yields a range of values
(the wave function) not a specific value.
The probability associated with each of those possible values is the probability that an observation would
reveal that specific value (e.g., that an observation would find the particle in one specific point). This was a
dramatic departure for Physics. Determinism was gone, because the state of a quantum system cannot be
determined anymore. Chance had entered the picture, because, when a Physicist performs an observation,
Nature decides randomly which of the possible values to reveal. And a discontinuity had been introduced
between unobserved reality and observed reality: as long as nobody measures it, a quantity has many values
(e.g., a particle is in many places at the same time), but, as soon as someone measures it, the quantity assumes
only one of those values (e.g, the particle is in one specific point).
The fact that the equations of different quantities were linked together (a consequence of Einstein's energy-
frequency equivalence) had another odd implication, expressed by Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle":
there is a limit to the precision with which we can measure quantities. The more precise we want to be about a
certain quantity, the less precise we will be about some other quantity.
Space-time turns out to be discrete: there is a minimum size to lengths and intervals, below which Physics
ceases to operate. Thus, there is a limit to how small a physical system can be.
Later, Physicists would realize that vacuum itself is unrecognizable in Quantum Mechanics: it is not empty.
Besides randomness, which was already difficult to digest, Physicists also had to accept "non-locality": a
system can affect a distant system despite the fact that they are not communicating. If two systems get
entangled in a wave, they will remain so forever, even if they move to the opposite sides of the universe, at a
distance at which a signal cannot travel in time to tell one what the other one is doing.
If this were not enough, Paul Dirac (1928) realized that the equations of Quantum Mechanics allowed for "anti-
matter" to exist next to usual matter, for example a positively charged electron exists that looks just like the
electron but has the opposite charge. Paul Dirac's equations for the electron in an electromagnetic field, which
combined Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity, transferred Quantum Theory outside Mechanics, into
Quantum Electrodynamics.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Quantum Mechanics is that a measurement causes a "collapse" of the
wave function. The observer changes the course of the universe by the simple act of looking at a particle inside
a microscope.
Isso levou a diferentes "interpretações" da Mecânica Quântica. Niels Bohr argumentou que talvez apenas os
fenômenos sejam reais. Werner Heisenberg, em vez disso, pensou que talvez o mundo "seja" feito de ondas de
possibilidade. Paul Dirac achava que a Mecânica Quântica simplesmente representa nosso conhecimento
(imperfeito) de um sistema. Hugh Everett tomou os múltiplos valores possíveis de cada quantidade
literalmente, e hipotetizou que vivemos em um "multiverso" sempre em multiplicação: em cada ponto do
tempo, o universo se divide de acordo com todos os valores possíveis de uma medida. Em cada novo universo,
um dos valores possíveis é observado e a vida continua.
John Von Neumann perguntou em que ponto ocorre o colapso. Se uma medida faz com que a natureza escolha
um valor, e apenas um, dentre os muitos permitidos pela equação de Schroedinger, "quando" isso ocorre? Em
outras palavras, onde no aparelho de medição isso ocorre? A medição é realizada por meio de uma máquina
que interage com o sistema quântico e, eventualmente, fornece uma medida visual ao cérebro humano. Em
algum lugar nesse processo, uma gama de possibilidades se reduz a um valor específico. Em algum lugar nesse
processo, o mundo quântico das ondas entra em colapso no mundo clássico dos objetos. A medição consiste em
uma cadeia de interações entre o aparelho e o sistema, em que os estados do aparelho se tornam dependentes
dos estados do sistema. Eventualmente, estados do observador ' A consciência é dependente dos estados do
sistema, e o observador "sabe" qual é o valor do observável. Se retrocedermos, isso parece implicar que o
"colapso" ocorre no ser consciente e que a consciência cria a realidade.
Einstein foi o principal crítico: ele acreditava que a Mecânica Quântica era uma descrição incompleta do
universo e que algumas "variáveis ocultas" acabariam por transformá-la em uma ciência determinista, assim
como a ciência tradicional e sua própria relatividade.
Desde o início, era óbvio qual seria o maior desafio da Mecânica Quântica: descobrir o "quantum" da
gravitação. Einstein havia explicado a gravitação como a curvatura do espaço-tempo, mas a Mecânica Quântica
foi fundada com base na premissa de que cada força é devida à troca de quanta: a gravidade parecia não
funcionar dessa maneira.
Um outro golpe na visão tradicional do universo veio da descoberta de Edwin Hubble (1929) de que o universo
está se expandindo. Não é apenas a Terra que está se movendo ao redor do Sol, e o Sol que está se movendo ao
redor do centro da nossa galáxia: mas todas as galáxias estão se afastando umas das outras.
A disciplina emergente foi a biologia. Na década de 1940, a teoria da evolução de Darwin (variação mais
seleção) havia finalmente se casado com a teoria da transmissão genética (mutação) de Mendel, produzindo a
"síntese moderna". Basicamente, a mutação de Mendel explicou que a variação de Darwin veio de. Ao mesmo
tempo, os biólogos se concentraram na população, não nos indivíduos, usando a ferramenta matemática das
probabilidades. Nasceu a "Genética Populacional".
Erwin Schroedinger percebeu um aparente paradoxo no mundo biológico: à medida que as espécies evoluem e
os organismos crescem, a vida cria a ordem da desordem, contradizendo assim a segunda lei da termodinâmica.
A solução para esse paradoxo é que a vida não é um sistema "fechado": o mundo biológico é um mundo de
fluxo de energia. Um organismo permanece vivo (isto é, mantém seu estado altamente organizado) absorvendo
energia do mundo exterior e processando-a para diminuir sua própria entropia (isto é, aumentar sua própria
ordem). "Os organismos vivos se alimentam de entropia negativa". A vida é "negentropic". O efeito da
negentropia da vida é que a entropia aumenta no mundo exterior. A sobrevivência de um ser vivo depende do
aumento da entropia do resto do universo.
No entanto, as vidas das pessoas comuns foram provavelmente mais afetadas por um tipo de ciência mais
humilde que se tornou difundida: materiais sintéticos. Em 1907, Leo Baekeland inventou o primeiro plástico
("baquelite"). Em 1925 foi introduzido o celofane e em 1930 foi a vez do poliestireno. Em 1935, Wallace
Carothers inventou o nylon.
A influência de Einstein também pode ser vista em Samuel Alexander, que acreditava na "evolução
emergente": a existência é organizada hierarquicamente e cada estágio emerge do anterior. A matéria emerge
do espaço-tempo, a vida emerge da matéria, a mente emerge da vida, Deus emerge da mente.
Argumentando contra o idealismo, materialismo e dualismo, Bertrand Russell aceitou literalmente Einstein e
adotou a visão de que não há substância ("monismo neutro"): tudo no universo é feito de eventos espaço-
temporais e os eventos não são mentais nem físicos. Matéria e mente são formas diferentes de organizar o
espaço-tempo.
Em outros lugares, ele concebeu a consciência como um órgão sensorial que nos permite perceber alguns dos
processos que ocorrem em nosso cérebro. A consciência nos fornece uma percepção direta e imediata do que
está no cérebro, enquanto os sentidos "observam" o que está no cérebro. O que um neurofisiologista realmente
vê ao examinar o cérebro de outra pessoa é parte do cérebro dela (do neurologista).
But Bertrand Russell was perhaps more influential in criticizing Frege's program. He found a paradox that
seemed to terminate the program to formalize Mathematics: the class of all the classes that are not members of
themselves is both a member and not a member of itself (the barber who shaves all barbers who do not shave
themselves both shaves and does not shave himself). He solved the paradox (and other similar paradoxes, such
as the proposition "I am lying" which is true if it is false and false if it is true) by introducing a "theory of
types", which basically resolved logical contradictions at a higher level.
Ludwig Wittgenstein erected another ambitious logical system. Believing that most philosophical problems are
non-issues created by linguistic misunderstandings, he set out to investigate the nature of language. He
concluded that the meaning of the world cannot be understood from inside the world, and thus metaphysics
cannot be justified from inside the world (no more and no less than religion or magic). Mathematics also lost
some of its appeal: it cannot be grounded in the world, therefore it is but a game played by mathematicians.
Wittgenstein saw that language has a function, that words are tools. Language is a game between people, and it
involves more than a mere transcription of meaning: it involves assertions, commands, questions, etc. The
meaning of a proposition can only be understood in its context, and the meaning of a word is due to the
consensus of a society. To understand a word is to understand a language.
Edward Sapir argued that language and thought influence each other. Thought shapes language, but language
also shapes thought. In fact, the structure of a language exerts an influence on the way its speakers understand
the world. Each language contains a "hidden metaphysics", an implicit classification of experience, a cultural
model, a system of values. Language implies the categories by which its speakers not only communicate but
also think.
Lev Vygotsky reached a similar conclusion from a developmental viewpoint: language mediates between
society and the child. Language guides the child's cognitive growth. Thus, cognitive faculties are merely
internalized versions of social processes that we learned via language as children. Thus, one's cognitive
development (way of thinking) depends on the society in which she grew up.
Something similar to the wave/particle dualism of Physics was taking place in Psychology. Behaviorists such
as John Watson, Ivan Pavlov and Burrhus Skinner believed that behavior is due to stimulus-response patterns.
Animals learn how to respond to a stimulus based on reward/punishment, i.e. via selective reinforcement of
random responses. All of behavior can be reduced to such "conditioned" learning. This also provided an elegant
parallel with Darwinian evolution, which is also based on selection by the environment of random mutations.
Behaviorists downplayed mind: thoughts have no effect on our actions.
Cognitivists such as Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Karl Lashley (the "gestalt" school) believed just
the opposite: an individual stimulus does not cause an individual response. We perceive (and react to) "form",
as a whole, not individual stimuli. We recognize objects not by focusing on the details of each image, but by
focusing the image as a whole. We solve problems not by breaking them down in more and more minute
details, but via sudden insight, often by restructuring the field of perception. Cognitivists believed that the
processing (thought) between input and output was the key to human behavior, whereas Behaviorists believed
that behavior was just a matter of linking outputs with inputs.
Cognitivists conceived the brain as a holistic system. Functions are not localized but distributed around the
brain. If a piece of the brain stops working, the brain as a whole may still be working. They envisioned memory
as an electromagnetic field, and a specific memory as a wave within that field.
Otto Selz was influenced by this school when he argued that to solve a problem entails to recognize the
situation and to fill in the gaps: information in excess contains the solution. Thus solving a problem consists in
comprehending it, and comprehending it consists in reducing the current situation to a past situation. Once we
"comprehend" it, we can also anticipate what comes next: inferring is anticipating.
Last, but not least, Fredrick Bartlett suggested that memory is not a kind of storage, because it obviously does
not remember the single words and images. Memory "reconstructs" the past. We are perfectly capable of
describing a scene or a novel or a film even though we cannot remember the vast majority of the details.
Memory has "encoded" the past in an efficient format of "schemata" that bear little resemblance to the original
scenes and stories, but that take little space and make it easy to reconstruct them when needed.
Kurt Goldstein's theory of disease is also an example of cognitivist thinking. Goldstein took issue against
dividing an organism into separate "organs": it is the whole that reacts to the environment. A "disease" is the
manifestation of a change in the relationship between the organism and its environment. Healing is not a
"repair", but an adaptation of the whole organism to the new state. A sick body is, in fact, a system that is
undergoing global reorganization.
Jean Piaget focused entirely on the mind, and precisely on the "growth" of the mind. He realized that, during
our lifetime, the mind grows, just like the body grows. For him cognition was self-regulation: organisms need
to constantly maintain a state of equilibrium with their environment.
Piaget believed that humans achieve that equilibrium through a number of stages, each stage corresponding
with a reorganization of our cognitive life. This was not a linear, gradual progress of learning, but a
discontinuous process of sudden cognitive jumps. Overall, the growth of the mind was a transition from the
stage of early childhood, in which the dominant factor is perception, which is irreversible, to the stage of
adulthood in which the dominant factor is abstract thought, which is reversible.
Charlie-Dunbar Broad was a materialist in the age of behaviorists and cognitivists. He believed that mind was
an emergent property of the brain, just like electricity is an emergent property of conductors. Ultimately, all is
matter.
That is not to say that the "spiritual" discourse was dead. Martin Buber that humans were mistaken in turning
subjects into objects and losing the meaning of God. He argued that our original state was one of "I-You", in
which the "I" recognizes other "I"'s in the world, but we moved towards a "I-It" state, in which the "I" sees both
objects and people merely as means to an end. This changes the way in which we engage in dialogue with each
other, and thus our existence. Thus we lost God, which is the "Eternal You".
Para Martin Heidegger, a questão fundamental era a questão de "ser". Um erro conceitual é pensar no ser
humano como "o que" em vez de "quem". Outro erro conceitual é separar o "quem" do "que": o ser humano é
parte do mundo, ao mesmo tempo que é o observador do mundo. O ser humano não é "Dasein" (existência),
mas "Dase-in" ("existente no mundo"). Não podemos nos separar da realidade porque somos parte dela. Nós
apenas "agimos": somos "jogados" em uma ação. Sabemos o que fazer porque o mundo não é um mundo de
partículas ou fórmulas: é um mundo de significado, que a mente pode entender.
Vladimir Vernadsky introduziu o conceito da "biosfera" para expressar a unidade de toda a vida.
Alfred Whitehead acreditava na unidade fundamental do mundo, devido à interação contínua de seus
constituintes, e que matéria e mente eram simplesmente diferentes aspectos da única realidade, devido ao fato
de que a mente é parte da interação corporal com o mundo. Ele pensava que cada partícula é um evento tendo
tanto um aspecto "objetivo" da matéria quanto um aspecto "subjetivo" da experiência. Alguns compostos
materiais, como o cérebro, criam a ilusão que chamamos de "eu". Mas o mental não é exclusivo dos humanos,
é onipresente por natureza.
A relação do eu com a realidade externa também foi analisada por George Herbert Mead, que viu a consciência
como, em última análise, uma característica do mundo, localizada fora do organismo e devido à interação do
organismo com o ambiente. Consciência "é" as qualidades dos objetos que percebemos. Essas qualidades são
percebidas do jeito que são por causa dos atos que realizamos. O mundo é o resultado de nossas ações. É a
nossa atuação no ambiente que determina o que percebemos como objetos. Organismos diferentes podem
perceber objetos diferentes. Somos atores e observadores (das conseqüências de nossas ações). A consciência
não é o processo cerebral: o processo cerebral é apenas a chave que liga ou desliga a consciência. A
consciência é penetrante na natureza. O que é exclusivo para os humanos, como espécies sociais, é que eles
podem relatar suas experiências conscientes. Essa "reportagem" é o que chamamos de "eu". Um eu sempre
pertence a uma sociedade de eus.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan acreditava que a ciência estava provando um processo universal de evolução em
diferentes níveis (material, orgânico, biológico, social) cujo objetivo final era revelar o absoluto (o nível
espiritual). A consciência humana não é o último passo na evolução, mas será sucedida pelo surgimento de uma
superconsciência capaz de realizar a união com uma realidade super-humana que a ciência humana não pode
compreender.
Muhammad Iqbal acreditava que os humanos são egos imperfeitos que estão se esforçando para alcançar Deus,
o ego absoluto.
No entanto, foi um economista, John Maynard Keynes, para enquadrar o problema filosófico fundamental do
estado pós-industrial. Como os cidadãos não precisam mais se preocupar com a sobrevivência, "o homem será
confrontado com seu problema real e permanente: como usar sua liberdade".
Mas Karl Jaspers via a existência como uma contradição em termos. Em teoria, os seres humanos são livres
para escolher a existência que preferem, mas na prática é impossível transcender o pano de fundo histórico e
social. Assim, a pessoa só está realmente livre de aceitar o próprio destino. Em última análise, podemos apenas
vislumbrar a essência de nossa própria existência, mas não podemos mudá-la.
A ambição de criar uma linguagem universal a la Leibniz para encontrar a solução para todos os problemas
filosóficos também não havia morrido. Vários filósofos, particularmente os "positivistas lógicos" (como Rudolf
Carnap e Alfred-Jules Ayer), lançaram nova luz sobre esse programa. Carnap acreditava que o significado só
poderia ser encontrado no casamento da ciência e na lógica simbólica de Frege. Ele acreditava no lema "o
significado de uma proposição é o seu método de verificação", que coloca toda a responsabilidade sobre os
sentidos. Ele rebaixou a Filosofia a uma disciplina de segunda categoria cuja única função seria esclarecer a
"sintaxe" do discurso lógico-científico. O problema é que os sentidos fornecem uma visão subjetiva do mundo
e, portanto, o "significado" derivado da verificação é pessoal, não universal. Além disso, não está claro como se
pode "verificar" declarações sobre o histórico. Logo ficou claro que mesmo proposições científicas não podem
ser "verificadas" de maneira absoluta. Por último, mas não menos importante, Carnap não pôde provar o
próprio princípio de verificação baseado no princípio da verificação.
Karl Popper esclareceu que a verdade é sempre e apenas relativa a uma teoria: nenhuma definição de verdade
absoluta é possível. A questão não é o que é "verdadeiro", mas o que é "científico". Popper argumentou que
comparar os fatos não era suficiente para se qualificar como "científico": uma teoria científica também deveria
fornecer os meios para se falsificar.
A lógica simbólica fez um enorme progresso e atingiu um nível impressionante de sofisticação. A premissa
implícita de muito trabalho na lógica era que as leis do pensamento são as leis da lógica e vice-versa. Depois de
Frege, as contribuições para "axiomatizating" Matemática e Linguagem vieram de Russell, Whitehead e
Wittgenstein. David Hilbert interpretou o espírito de sua época ao apresentar seu programa de "sistemas
formais", que, mais uma vez, era uma adaptação do antigo sonho de Leibniz: elaborar um procedimento
automático que, aplicando um conjunto de regras a um conjunto de axiomas, Ninguém poderia provar qualquer
possível teorema. Um grande revés para o programa de Hilbert foi o teorema da incompletude de Kurt Goedel
(1931): todo sistema formal (que contém aritmética) também contém pelo menos uma proposição que não pode
ser provada como verdadeira ou falsa (uma proposição que não pode ser provada). Em outras palavras, há
sempre um teorema improvável em todos os sistemas a la Hilbert. Assim, o programa de Hilbert parecia
impossível. No entanto, Alan Turing eventualmente (1936) encontrou o procedimento de Hilbert, que veio a ser
chamado de "Máquina de Turing" (uma máquina imaginária, não física). Tal máquina é capaz de realizar
algumas operações elementares em símbolos (ler símbolos atuais, processá-los, escrever novos símbolos,
examinar novos símbolos) e é capaz de lembrar seu próprio estado. Pode-se imaginar um número infinito de
máquinas de Turing, dependendo das regras para manipular os símbolos. Turing então imaginou uma máquina
"universal" capaz de simular todas as máquinas de Turing possíveis.
Turing fez mais do que completar o programa de Hilbert: ele introduziu todo um novo vocabulário. O
raciocínio foi reduzido à computação, que foi a manipulação de símbolos. Assim, o "pensamento" foi reduzido
ao processamento de símbolos. Além disso, Turing mudou a ênfase de "fórmulas" para "algoritmos": a máquina
de Turing era uma série de instruções. O computador de hoje é apenas a implementação física de uma máquina
universal de Turing com uma memória finita.
Alfred Tarski encontrou a "verdade" que Carnap estava procurando. Tarski percebeu uma diferença sutil, mas
fundamental, entre o fato de que "p" é verdadeiro e a sentença "p é verdadeira". O fato e a sentença estão se
referindo a duas coisas diferentes, ou a mesma coisa em níveis diferentes. Este último é uma "meta-sentença",
expressa em uma meta-linguagem. As sentenças da meta-linguagem são sobre sentenças da linguagem. Tarski
percebeu que a verdade dentro de uma teoria só pode ser definida em relação a outra teoria, a metateoria. Na
metateoria, pode-se definir (pode-se listar) todas as afirmações que são verdadeiras na teoria. Tarski substituiu
a noção intuitiva de "verdade" por uma série infinita de regras que definem a verdade em uma linguagem
relativa à verdade em outra língua.
Ernst Cassirer adotou a visão que vinha da lógica: que a mente humana é um sistema simbólico e que a
"compreensão" do mundo está se transformando em símbolos. A diferença entre animais e humanos é que os
animais vivem no mundo, enquanto os humanos vivem em uma representação simbólica do mundo. Todos os
artefatos culturais são formas simbólicas que medeiam entre o eu e o mundo.
Alfred Korzybski fez uma distinção similar entre animais e humanos. Os animais são apenas caçadores e
coletores, atividades que estão ligadas ao território, ou seja, são "ligantes do espaço". Os humanos, ao
contrário, desenvolveram a agricultura, que está ligada a uma lembrança do passado e à previsão do futuro, ou
seja, eles são "vinculados ao tempo". A vinculação de tempo é possibilitada pela manipulação de símbolos e
permite transmitir conhecimento a outros humanos.
A influência de Peirce oferecia uma visão diferente sobre a verdade e o significado. John Dewey via o
conhecimento como uma maneira de gerar certeza a partir da dúvida (hábitos do caos). Quando confrontados
com uma situação indeterminada, os humanos elaboram uma teoria científica ou de senso comum dessa
situação que reduz sua indeterminação. Charles Morris desenvolveu uma teoria dos signos ("semiótica")
baseada nas teorias de Peirce e Saussure, e separou três disciplinas de signos: "sintaxe" estuda a relação entre
signos e signos; "semântica" estuda a relação entre signos e objetos; "pragmática" estuda a relação entre signos,
objetos e usuários.
A Segunda Guerra Mundial (1939-1945) começou na década de 1930, quando a Alemanha (Áustria 1938,
Checoslováquia 1938), Itália (Etiópia 1936) e Japão (Manchúria 1931, China 1937, Indochina 1940)
começaram a expandir seus respectivos territórios através de uma política de agressão e anexação.
Eventualmente, depois que a Alemanha (1939-1940) invadiu a Polônia e a França, os poderes do mundo caíram
em dois campos: Grã-Bretanha, EUA e Rússia (que venceram) contra a Alemanha, a Itália e o Japão (o "eixo").
A Segunda Guerra Mundial tornou explícito o compromisso com o genocídio: a Alemanha abateu judeus aos
milhões em câmaras de gás, os EUA venceram a guerra detonando as primeiras armas nucleares (a primeira
aplicação prática da Relatividade de Einstein).
De fato, tanto a vergonha do apocalipse (as duas guerras mundiais acabaram de terminar) quanto o medo do
apocalipse (o holocausto nuclear) permearam o clima cultural da época.
Na poesia, o espírito apocalíptico da época foi capturado por "Duineser Elegien" de Rainer Maria Rilke (1923),
"The Tower" de William Yeats (1928), "Poema do Tempo de Stony" de Czeslaw Milosz (1933), "Mensagem de
Fernando Pessoa". "(1933)," Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejias "(1935) de Federico Garcia-Lorca," Bufera "de
Eugenio Montale (1941), In This Year" de Nazim Hikmet "(1941)," Notas para uma ficção suprema "de
Wallace Stevens ( 1942), "Four Quartets" de Thomas-Stearns Eliot (1942), "La Estacion Total" de Juan-Ramon
Jiménez (1946).
No teatro, novas formas de expressão foram inventadas para transmitir a mensagem de "Masse-Mensch" (1921)
de Ernst Toller, "Enrico IV" de Luigi Pirandello (1922), Paul Claudel (1868): "Le Soulier de Satin" (1928) ,
"Electre" de Jean Giraudoux (1937), "Leben Des Galilei" de Bertold Brecht (1939).
Mas este foi certamente o século do romance. O espírito dos tempos foi capturado por "Ulysses" de James
Joyce (1922), "A pesquisa do tempo" de Marcel Proust (1922), "La Coscienza di Zeno" (1923) de Italo Svevo,
"The Great" de Francis-Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby "(1925)," Les Faux-Monnayeurs "de Andre Gide (1925)," To
The Lighthouse "de Virginia Woolf (1927)," Adrienne Mesurat "de Julien Green (1927)," Insaciabilidade "de
Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1930), Louis -Ferdinand Celine "Voyage a Bout de la Nuit" (1932), "Light in August"
de William Faulkner (1932), "O homem sem qualidades" de Robert Musil (1933), "Auto Da Fe" de Elias
Canetti (1935), Flann O'Brien "
If literature was getting, overall, more "narrative", painting became more abstract and symbolic with Rene
Magritte's "Faux Miroir" (1928), Salvator Dali's "La Persistence de la Memoire" (1931), Paul Klee's "Ad
Parnassum" (1932), Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" (1937), Max Ernst's "Europe After the Rain II" (1942).
Constantin Brancusi and Hans Arp were the giants of sculpture.
Music continued its journey away from the classical canon with Leos Janacek's "Glagolitic Mass" (1926), Bela
Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" (1936) Edgar Varese's "Ionisation" (1933) Alban Berg's
"Violin Concerto" (1935) Olivier Messiaen's "Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps" (1941) and Goffredo Petrassi's
"Coro di Morti" (1941).
On the lighter side, new forms of entertainment and mass media were born, mostly in the USA. In 1914
composer Jerome Kern had staged the first "musical". In 1926 Hollywood debuted the "talking movie" (films
with synchronized voice and music). In 1927 Philo Farnsworth invented television.
Cinema was by far the most influential of new forms of art, thanks to films such as David-Wark Griffith's "The
Birth of a Nation" (1915), Victor Sjostrom's "Phantom Chariot" (1920), Erich von Stroheim's "Greed" (1924),
Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1926), Josef von Sternberg's "Das
Blaue Engel" (1930), the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup" (1933), Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936), Jean
Renoir's "La Grande Illusion" (1937), Howard Hawks's "Bringing Up Baby" (1938), Orson Welles's "Citizen
Kane" (1941), Frank Capra's "John Doe" (1941).
But the visual arts also added a new one: the comics. The comics came to compete with the novel and the film,
and reached their artistic peak with "Little Nemo" (1905), "Popeye" (1929), "Buck Rogers" (1929), "Tintin"
(1929), "Mickey Mouse" (1930), "Dick Tracy" (1931), "Alley Oop" (1933), "Brick Bradford" (1933), "Flash
Gordon" (1934), "Li'l Abner" (1934), "Terry Lee" (1934).
America's contribution to music included Afro-American music: the blues was born around 1912, jazz in 1917,
gospel in 1932, rhythm'n'blues in 1942, bebop in 1945.
After World War 2, Stalin's Soviet Union became an exporter of "revolutions" throughout the world, an
ideological empire that had few precedents in history: Mao Tze-tung's China in 1949, Ho Chi Min's Vietnam in
1954, Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1959, Julius Nyere's Tanzania in 1961, Kenneth Kaunda's Zambia in 1964, Siad
Barre's Somalia in 1969, Haile Mengitsu's Ethiopia in 1974, Samora Machel's Mozambique in 1975, Pol Pot's
Cambodia in 1975, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe in 1980, Arap Moi's Kenya in 1982, etc. The USA retaliated
by supporting anti-communist regimes around the world (often as totalitarian as the ones imposed by the
communist revolutions). In Latin America, for example, the Soviet Union, via its proxy of Cuba, sponsored a
series of national insurrections, while the USA supported "caudillos" that were no more democratic than Hitler
(Guatemala 1960, Bolivia 1965, Chile 1973, Peru 1970, Colombia 1979, El Salvador 1980).
Both the Soviet Union and the USA fought for supremacy in what was termed a "Cold War", a war that was
never fought directly but only indirectly, everywhere and all the time. They both became military superpowers
by amassing thousands of nuclear weapons. The nuclear deterrence worked insofar as they never struck at each
other. But the consequence was that the theater of military operations was the entire planet.
The "Cold War" resulted in a partition of the world in two spheres of influence: Soviet and American. An "iron
curtain" divided Europe in two, and the Wall (1961) that divided West and East Berlin was its main symbol.
A parallel process, soon engulfed in the Cold War, was the decolonization of Africa and Asia. Mahatma Gandhi
was the most celebrate of the independence leaders. The European powers granted independence to most of
their colonies. New countries were born (India and Pakistan in 1947, Israel in 1948, Indonesia in 1949, Ghana
in 1957, and most of Africa followed within a decade). The exceptions (Algeria, Angola, Portugal) suffered
from decade-long independence wars. Even where independence had been granted, intestine civil wars caused
massive convulsions, again exploited by the two superpowers for their power games.
Another by-product of the post-war order was the birth of Arab nationalism with Egyptian leader Gamal
Nasser.
The most visible political decline was the one of Britain. While its empire was disintegrating and its economy
was slower than the economies of Germany, Japan and France (that soon passed it in GDP terms), Britain
maintained an aloof attitude, reveling in its diversity: it did not join the European Community, it did not adopt
the metric system, etc. Outdated industrial infrastructure. It reorganized the empire as the Commonwealth, but
that was a cost, no longer a source of revenues. Despite being the real winner of World War 2, Britain became
rapidly irrelevant.
The western European countries, assembled around a USA-led alliance (NATO), were free and democratic
(with the exception of the Iberian peninsula) but were nonetheless torn between a socialist left and a capitalist
right. De facto, they all adopted different versions of the same model: a social-democratic state that guaranteed
rights to workers and sheltered citizens through a generous social net.
Among armed conflicts, two were particularly significant: the Arab-Israeli conflict (1948-2004) and the USA-
Vietnam war (1964-1973). They both dragged the USA into long and expensive military ventures.
Despite the political gloom, the post-war age was the age of consumerism, of the economic boom (in the USA,
Japan and western Europe), of the "baby boom" and of the mass media.
O escritório foi mecanizado e eletrificado graças a um dilúvio de calculadoras, fotocopiadoras, telefax, telex,
telefones de toque e, finalmente, computadores de grande porte (1964).
Os marcos nas comunicações foram o cabo telefônico através do Atlântico (1956) e o primeiro satélite de
telecomunicações (1962).
Os principais pontos de transporte foram o primeiro voo transatlântico da Pan Am (1939), o jato de longa
distância (1958) e o jato de corpo largo (1967).
A televisão comercial introduziu formas baratas de entretenimento em massa.
O disco de vinil de longa duração de 33-1 / 3 RPM (1948) e o rádio transistor (1954) mudaram a forma como
as pessoas (especialmente os jovens) ouviam música.
Uma cultura jovem começou a aparecer nos EUA na década de 1950, inicialmente criticada como uma cultura
de "delinqüentes juvenis", e evoluiu para a geração do movimento da liberdade de expressão, dos direitos civis,
do movimento anti-guerra e do movimento hippies. Em seguida, migrou para a Europa, onde se transformou
nos tumultos estudantis de 1968.
A música rock era muito a trilha sonora do movimento juvenil. Rock'n'Roll foi a música dos jovens rebeldes
que reagiram contra as convenções repressivas da sociedade do pós-guerra. Bob Dylan e os cantores populares
militantes interpretaram a desconfiança dos jovens em relação ao establishment e a seus sonhos idealistas. A
música psicodélica era parte integrante do movimento hippie (e mudou dramaticamente o conceito de "música"
ao introduzir elementos atonais e anárquicos).
Os anos 1960 foram também a era da revolução sexual e do feminismo, anunciada por Simone de Beauvoir.
O acontecimento mais emocional para o imaginário coletivo foi a exploração espacial, em grande parte
alimentada pela rivalidade entre os EUA e a União Soviética. Em 1957, a União Soviética lançou o primeiro
satélite artificial, o "Sputnik". Em 1961, Yuri Gagarin tornou-se o primeiro astronauta humano. Em 1962, os
EUA lançaram o primeiro satélite de telecomunicações, o "Telstar". Em 1969, Neil Armstrong tornou-se o
primeiro humano a pisar na Lua.
No entanto, o progresso na Física certamente não se limitou ao espaço. De fato, a Física estava crescendo desde
muito pequena a muito grande.
A astronomia revelou um mundo totalmente novo para os povos da Terra que costumavam acreditar (apenas
alguns milhares de anos antes) que a Terra era tudo o que havia nela. Existem bilhões de galáxias no universo,
cada uma composta de bilhões de estrelas (200 bilhões em nossa galáxia, aproximadamente a "Via Láctea"), e
os planetas orbitam em torno das estrelas (nove ao redor da nossa, o Sol). Plutão, o último dos planetas solares,
acabou sendo 5,9 bilhões de kms do Sol, uma distância que nenhum humano poderia cobrir durante a vida. As
distâncias foram subitamente medidas em "ano-luz", sendo um ano-luz de 9 trilhões de quilômetros, uma
distância inimaginável apenas um século antes. A estrela mais próxima é "Alpha Centauri", a 4,3 anos-luz da
Terra. Sirius, a estrela mais brilhante do céu, está a 8,7 anos-luz de distância. O centro da Via Láctea fica a 26
mil anos-luz do Sol. Andrômeda, a galáxia mais próxima, está a 2,2 milhões de anos-luz de distância.
Em 1965, a "radiação de fundo de microondas" foi descoberta, um resquício de algum evento catastrófico há
muito tempo atrás no passado do universo. Esse evento foi chamado de "Big Bang": o universo nasceu quando
uma explosão massiva enviou a energia original em todas as direções. Eventualmente, a gravitação fez com que
pedaços de matéria se unissem, formando assim as estruturas que observamos hoje (galáxias, estrelas,
planetas), deixando para trás a radiação de fundo e causando a expansão do universo que ainda está
acontecendo. Dependendo da quantidade de massa existente no universo, essa expansão pode um dia ser
revertida (e terminar em "Big Crunch") ou continuar para sempre. Os cosmólogos também percebem que
existem diferentes tipos de "estrelas". Alguns deles são muito pequenos e muito pesados, e girar freneticamente
em torno de seu eixo ("pulsares"). Alguns deles colapsaram em "buracos negros", que são corpos cujo campo
gravitacional é tão forte que nada consegue escapar, nem mesmo a luz. Dentro dos buracos negros, o tempo e o
espaço dividem-se em papéis: um objeto só pode avançar no espaço (em direção ao centro do buraco negro), ao
mesmo tempo em que pode se mover no tempo.
As esquisitices da Cosmologia alimentaram um boom de ficção científica (quadrinhos, filmes, novelas, séries
de TV).
As for the "very small", the view of matter made of three particles (electron, proton and neutron) was shattered
by the discoveries of a multitude of subatomic particles. The radioactive decay of atomic nuclei, first observed
in 1896 by Antoine Becquerel, Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, had already signaled the existence of a fourth
kind of fundamental force (the "weak" force) to the known three (gravitational, electromagnetic, and nuclear or
"strong"). Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 inferred the existence of the neutrino to explain a particular case of
radioactive decay. Another source of new particles was the study of "cosmic rays", that Victor Franz Hess
reduced to radiation coming from the space (1912). This led to the discovery of muons (1937) and pions
(predicted in 1935 by Yukawa Hideki). In 1963 Murray Gell-Man hypothesized that the nucleus of the atom
was made of smaller particles. In 1967 the theory of quarks (Quantum Chromodynamics) debuted: the nucleus
of the atom (neutrons and protons) is made of quarks, that are held together by gluons. Quarks differ from
previously known particles because their magic number is "three", not two: there are six quarks, each coming
in three "flavors" (and each having, as usual, its anti-quark) and they combine not in pairs but in trios.
As forças são mediadas por pacotes discretos de energia, representados como partículas virtuais ou "quanta". O
quantum do campo eletromagnético (por exemplo, da luz) é o fóton: qualquer fenômeno eletromagnético
envolve a troca de um número de fótons entre as partículas que participam dele. Outras forças são definidas por
outros quanta: a força fraca pela partícula W, a gravitação (supostamente) pelo gráviton e a força nuclear por
glúons. As partículas podem ser divididas de acordo com um princípio formulado pela primeira vez (em 1925)
por Wolfgang Pauli: algumas partículas (os "férmions", em homenagem a Enrico Fermi) nunca ocupam o
mesmo estado ao mesmo tempo, enquanto outras partículas (os "bósons"). nomeado após Satyendra Bose). As
funções de onda de dois férmions nunca podem se sobrepor completamente, enquanto as ondas de dois bósons
podem se sobrepor completamente (os bósons basicamente perdem sua identidade e se tornam um). Férmions
(como os elétrons e sua família, os leptons e quarks e seus "hádrons", prótons e nêutrons) formam a matéria do
universo, enquanto bósons (fótons, grávitons, glúons) são as partículas virtuais que colam os férmions juntos .
Bosões, portanto, representam as forças que atuam em férmions. Eles são os quanta de interação. Uma
interação é sempre implementada através da troca de bósons entre férmions. (Existem partículas que são
bósons, mas não representam interações, os chamados "mesons", que são feitos de quarks e decaem muito
rapidamente). e quarks e seus "hádrons", prótons e nêutrons compõem a matéria do universo, enquanto bósons
(fótons, grávitons, glúons) são as partículas virtuais que colam os férmions juntos. Bosões, portanto,
representam as forças que atuam em férmions. Eles são os quanta de interação. Uma interação é sempre
implementada através da troca de bósons entre férmions. (Existem partículas que são bósons, mas não
representam interações, os chamados "mesons", que são feitos de quarks e decaem muito rapidamente). e
quarks e seus "hádrons", prótons e nêutrons compõem a matéria do universo, enquanto bósons (fótons,
grávitons, glúons) são as partículas virtuais que colam os férmions juntos. Bosões, portanto, representam as
forças que atuam em férmions. Eles são os quanta de interação. Uma interação é sempre implementada através
da troca de bósons entre férmions. (Existem partículas que são bósons, mas não representam interações, os
chamados "mesons", que são feitos de quarks e decaem muito rapidamente). Uma interação é sempre
implementada através da troca de bósons entre férmions. (Existem partículas que são bósons, mas não
representam interações, os chamados "mesons", que são feitos de quarks e decaem muito rapidamente). Uma
interação é sempre implementada através da troca de bósons entre férmions. (Existem partículas que são
bósons, mas não representam interações, os chamados "mesons", que são feitos de quarks e decaem muito
rapidamente).
Existem doze léptons: o elétron, o múon, o tau, seus três neutrinos e suas seis antipartículas. Existem 36
quarks: seis vezes três sabores mais os correspondentes anti-quarks. Assim, existem 4 forças, 36 quarks, 12
léptons, 12 bósons.
A ciência foi até aplicada à própria vida.
Ilya Prigogine desenvolveu a "Termodinâmica de Não-Equilíbrio" para explicar fenômenos distantes do

equilíbrio, como a própria vida. Ele dividiu a natureza em sistemas "conservadores" (os estudados pela física
clássica) e "dissipativos" (sujeitos a fluxos de energia / matéria), e notou que os últimos são onipresentes na
natureza: tudo o que está vivo é um sistema dissipativo. Eles criam ordem alimentando-se de energia externa:
são sistemas de não-equilíbrio que são sustentados por um influxo constante de matéria / energia. Ele percebeu
que tais sistemas exibem desenvolvimento espontâneo de ordem: eles são sistemas auto-organizados, que
mantêm sua organização interna trocando matéria / energia com o ambiente.
James Jerome Gibson olha a vida do ponto de vista de uma rede de seres vivos integrados. Um ser vivo não
existe isoladamente. Na verdade, seu principal objetivo é coletar informações do ambiente. Todas as
informações necessárias para sobreviver estão disponíveis no ambiente. Assim, a informação se origina da
interação entre o organismo e seu ambiente. Informação "é" o fluxo contínuo de energia do ambiente.
O outro grande fascínio foi com os computadores, desenvolvidos durante a guerra para decifrar o código
secreto alemão. Em 1946, o primeiro computador não militar, "Eniac", foi revelado. Em 1947, William
Shockley inventou o transistor no Bell Labs. Em 1951 foi construído o primeiro computador comercial, o
"Univac". Em 1955, John McCarthy fundou a "Artificial Intelligence", uma disciplina para estudar se máquinas
"inteligentes" poderiam ser construídas. Em 1956, Robert Noyce e Jack Kilby inventaram o microchip, que
possibilitou a construção de computadores menores. Em 1958, a Texas Instruments construiu o primeiro
circuito integrado. Também em 1958, Jim Backus (da IBM) inventou a linguagem de programação FORTRAN,
a primeira linguagem independente de máquina. Em 1965, Gordon Moore previu que o poder de
processamento dos computadores dobraria a cada 18 meses. Em 1964, a IBM introduziu o primeiro "sistema
operacional" para computadores (o "OS / 360"). Em 1965, a DEC apresentou o primeiro minicomputador, o
PDP-8, que usava circuitos integrados.
A genética rapidamente se tornou o campo mais excitante da biologia. Cada célula viva contém ácido
desoxirribonucleico (descoberto em 1944 por Oswald Avery) e, em 1953, Francis Crick e James Watson
descobriram a estrutura de dupla hélice da molécula de DNA: a informação genética é codificada de uma forma
bastante matemática. , que foi batizado de "código genético" porque é o que é, um código escrito em um
alfabeto de quatro "letras" (que são, fisicamente, ácidos). Crick chegou à conclusão de que a informação flui
apenas dos (quatro) ácidos nucléicos do DNA para os (vinte) aminoácidos das proteínas, e nunca o contrário.
Em outras palavras: genes codificados no DNA determinam o organismo. Um organismo deve sua estrutura ao
seu "genoma", seu repertório de genes. Demorou mais alguns anos para os biólogos decifrarem o código
genético, ou seja, descobrir como a linguagem de quatro letras do DNA é traduzida para a linguagem de
proteínas de vinte letras. Os biólogos também descobriram o ácido ribonucléico (RNA), a molécula de fita
simples que faz parceria com o DNA para fabricar proteínas.
Menos anunciado, mas não menos poderoso para mudar nossa visão de nossa raça, foi o progresso feito pelos
neurologistas em entender como o cérebro funciona. O neurônio fora descoberto em 1891 por Santiago Ramon
y Cajal e, em 1898, Edward Thorndike já havia proposto que o cérebro era um sistema "conexionista" (que as
conexões, e não as unidades, eram a chave para o seu funcionamento). Mas o quadro permaneceu indefinido
até que (1949) Donald Hebb mostrou que essas conexões eram dinâmicas, não estáticas, e que elas mudaram de
acordo com um sistema de punição e recompensa, ou "seletivamente": uma conexão que foi usada para
produzir comportamento útil foi reforçada , um que foi parte de um fracasso foi enfraquecido. Como as novas
técnicas permitiram aos neurologistas examinar a atividade elétrica e química do cérebro, ficou claro que os
neurônios se comunicam via " ativado quando a soma de suas entradas (os neurotransmissores recebidos de
outros neurônios, ponderados de acordo com a "força" das conexões correspondentes) excede um certo
potencial. As conexões entre os neurônios são continuamente ajustadas para melhorar a precisão das respostas
do cérebro. Basicamente, cada operação de reconhecimento é também uma operação de aprendizado, porque as
conexões são refinadas a cada vez que são usadas. A estrutura do cérebro também ficou mais clara, em
particular o fato de que existem dois hemisférios, sendo o esquerdo dominante para linguagem e fala, sendo o
direito dominante para tarefas visuais e motoras. ativado quando a soma de suas entradas (os
neurotransmissores recebidos de outros neurônios, ponderados de acordo com a "força" das conexões
correspondentes) excede um certo potencial. As conexões entre os neurônios são continuamente ajustadas para
melhorar a precisão das respostas do cérebro. Basicamente, cada operação de reconhecimento é também uma
operação de aprendizado, porque as conexões são refinadas a cada vez que são usadas. A estrutura do cérebro
também ficou mais clara, em particular o fato de que existem dois hemisférios, sendo o esquerdo dominante
para linguagem e fala, sendo o direito dominante para tarefas visuais e motoras. As conexões entre os
neurônios são continuamente ajustadas para melhorar a precisão das respostas do cérebro. Basicamente, cada
operação de reconhecimento é também uma operação de aprendizado, porque as conexões são refinadas a cada
vez que são usadas. A estrutura do cérebro também ficou mais clara, em particular o fato de que existem dois
hemisférios, sendo o esquerdo dominante para linguagem e fala, sendo o direito dominante para tarefas visuais
e motoras. As conexões entre os neurônios são continuamente ajustadas para melhorar a precisão das respostas
do cérebro. Basicamente, cada operação de reconhecimento é também uma operação de aprendizado, porque as
conexões são refinadas a cada vez que são usadas. A estrutura do cérebro também ficou mais clara, em
particular o fato de que existem dois hemisférios, sendo o esquerdo dominante para linguagem e fala, sendo o
direito dominante para tarefas visuais e motoras.
Michel Jouvet descobriu que o sono REM (movimento rápido dos olhos) é gerado no tronco cerebral pontino
(ou "ponte"). A ponte envia sinais para os músculos oculares (causando o movimento ocular), para o
mesencéfalo (causando um baixo nível de atividade cerebral e inibição dos movimentos musculares) e para o
tálamo. O tálamo então excita o córtex, que recebe um sinal sensorial válido do tálamo e o interpreta como se
estivesse vindo dos órgãos dos sentidos. Durante o sono REM, várias áreas do cérebro estão trabalhando
freneticamente, e algumas delas estão fazendo exatamente o mesmo trabalho que fazem quando o cérebro está
acordado. A única grande diferença é que os estímulos que eles processam são agora provenientes de uma fonte
interna e não do ambiente: durante os sonhos, o input sensorial vem do córtex sensorial.
A obsessão com a "máquina" abstrata de Alan Turing e com os primeiros computadores concretos moldou o
panorama intelectual de muitos pensadores. Não só Turing provara que o computador era, basicamente, um ser
"inteligente". John Von Neumann, com seus experimentos embrionários sobre vida artificial ou "autômatos
celulares" (1947), também mostrou como tal máquina poderia se reproduzir e evoluir.
Foi o próprio Turing a estruturar a questão filosófica para as próximas gerações, com o que veio a ser
conhecido como "teste de Turing" (1947): pode-se dizer que uma máquina é inteligente se um ser humano,
fazendo todo tipo de perguntas, não souber se as respostas vêm de um ser humano ou de uma máquina. Foi, em
última análise, uma abordagem "behaviorista" para definir a inteligência: se uma máquina se comporta
exatamente como um ser humano, do que é tão inteligente quanto o ser humano.
Kenneth Craik via a mente como um tipo particular de máquina capaz de construir modelos internos do mundo
e processá-los para produzir ação. A ênfase de Craik estava na representação interna e no processamento
simbólico de tal representação.
As idéias de Craik formaram a base para a teoria da mente de Herbert Simon e Allen Newell, de que a mente
humana é apenas um "processador de símbolos físicos". A implicação era que o computador era, de fato,
inteligente: era apenas uma questão de programá-lo como a mente é. Eles começaram a implementar um
"solucionador geral", um programa de computador que, usando a lógica, seria capaz de resolver qualquer
problema possível (o sonho de Hilbert).
O pressuposto implícito por trás do programa de "Inteligência Artificial" era que a "função" é o que importa: as
"coisas" (cérebros ou circuitos integrados) não são importantes.
Hilary Putnam argumentou que o mesmo estado mental pode ser realizado em mais de um estado físico, por
exemplo, a dor pode ser percebida por mais de um cérebro (apesar do fato de que todos os cérebros são
diferentes). Portanto, o estado físico não é tão importante. É a "função" que torna um estado físico do cérebro
também um estado mental. Estados mentais são meras decorações: eles têm uma função. A consequência dessa
conclusão, porém, é que uma mente não precisa necessariamente de um cérebro. De fato, um computador faz
exatamente o que uma mente faz: executar funções que podem ser implementadas por diferentes estados físicos
(software diferente). A abordagem "funcionalista" popularizou a visão de que a mente é o software e o cérebro
é seu hardware.
Jerry Fodor especulou que a mente representa o conhecimento em termos de símbolos e manipula esses
símbolos para produzir o pensamento. A manipulação desses símbolos é puramente sintática (sem saber o que
esses símbolos "significam"). A mente usa uma "linguagem do pensamento" (ou "mentalese"), comum a todos
os seres sencientes, e produzida através da evolução, para construir essas representações mentais.
O programa de Inteligência Artificial não teve tanto sucesso quanto seus pioneiros esperavam porque
negligenciaram a importância do conhecimento. Um sistema "inteligente" só é capaz de realizar operações
lógicas, por mais inteligentes que sejam; mas, em última análise, mesmo o ser humano mais inteligente do
mundo precisa de conhecimento para tomar decisões sensatas. Na verdade, é provável que uma pessoa com
muito conhecimento tome uma decisão mais sensata do que uma pessoa muito mais inteligente, com muito
pouco conhecimento. Assim, a primazia mudou de "inteligência" para "conhecimento": "Sistemas
especialistas" (inicialmente concebido por volta de 1965) aplica um "solucionador geral de problemas" a uma
"base de conhecimento". A base de conhecimento é construída pela "clonagem" de um especialista humano
(geralmente através de um longo processo de entrevistas). Uma base de conhecimento codifica fatos e regras
que são específicos para o "domínio" do conhecimento do especialista humano. Uma vez que o conhecimento
apropriado tenha sido "eliciado", o sistema especialista se comporta como um especialista humano.
Paralelamente à escola "baseada no conhecimento", a busca pela inteligência das máquinas também buscava
outros caminhos.
Norman Wiener notou que os sistemas vivos e as máquinas são "sistemas de controle", sistemas nos quais o
"feedback" é empregado para manter a "homeostase" interna (um estado estacionário). Um termostato é um
sistema de controle típico: detecta a temperatura do ambiente e direciona o aquecedor para ligar ou desligar;
isso causa uma mudança na temperatura, que por sua vez é detectada pelo termostato; e assim por diante. Todo
sistema vivo também é um sistema de controle. Ambos os sistemas vivos e máquinas são sistemas
"cibernéticos". O "feedback" que permite que um sistema se controle é, em última análise, uma troca de
informações entre as partes do sistema.
Claude Shannon elaborou uma metáfora não menos influente para as máquinas: elas também são semelhantes
aos sistemas termodinâmicos. A entropia de um sistema termodinâmico é uma medida de desordem, isto é, uma
medida da distribuição aleatória de átomos. À medida que a entropia aumenta, essa distribuição se torna mais
homogênea. Quanto mais homogênea a distribuição, menos informativa ela é. Portanto, a entropia é também
uma medida da falta de informação.
Ainda outra versão dos fatos foi entregue pelos proponentes de "Redes Neurais".
Uma "rede neural" artificial é uma peça de software ou hardware que simula a rede neural do cérebro. Várias
unidades simples são conectadas juntas, com cada unidade conectando-se a qualquer número de outras
unidades. A "força" das conexões pode flutuar da força zero à força infinita. Inicialmente, as conexões são
definidas aleatoriamente. Durante um período de "treinamento", a rede é feita para ajustar a força das conexões
usando algum tipo de feedback: toda vez que uma entrada é apresentada, a rede é informada sobre qual deve
ser a saída e solicitada a ajustar suas conexões de acordo. A rede continua a aprender para sempre, pois cada
nova entrada causa um reajuste das conexões.
A diferença entre "sistemas especialistas" e "redes neurais" é na verdade bastante ideológica. Os sistemas
especialistas operam no nível do conhecimento, enquanto as redes neurais operam no nível das conexões. De
certa forma, eles descrevem duas formas diferentes de olhar para a inteligência humana: como um cérebro que
produz um comportamento inteligente e uma mente que produz decisões inteligentes.
Desnecessário dizer que o problema mente-corpo, originalmente introduzido por Descartes, foi revivido pelo
advento do computador.
Os dualistas estenderam amplamente uma intuição de Charlie-Dunbar Broad, de que o universo é uma série de
camadas, e que cada camada produz a seguinte camada, mas não pode explicar as novas propriedades que
emergem com ela. Por exemplo, a camada de partículas elementares produz a camada de fenómenos
macroscópicos. Cada nova camada é um fenômeno "emergente" de uma camada inferior. Assim, a mente é uma
propriedade emergente do cérebro e não uma substância separada. O novo dualismo era um dualismo de
propriedades, não um dualismo de substâncias. O dualismo foi reafirmado como "superveniência". As
propriedades biológicas "sobrevêm" (ou "são supervenientes") às propriedades físicas, porque as propriedades
biológicas de um sistema são determinadas por suas propriedades físicas. Da mesma forma, as propriedades
mentais são supervenientes às propriedades neurais.
Herbert Feigl reviveu o materialismo na era do cérebro: a mente é criada pelos processos neurais no cérebro.
Nós não explicamos como isso acontece da mesma maneira que os humanos não puderam explicar o raio ou o
magnetismo por séculos. Não obstante, estados mentais "são" estados físicos do cérebro. Filósofos como
Donald Davidson perceberam que é implausível supor que para cada estado mental existe um estado físico
único do cérebro (uma correspondência de um para um). Por exemplo, uma pessoa pode ter o mesmo
sentimento duas vezes, apesar do fato de que a configuração do cérebro mudou. Assim, a "teoria da identidade"
de Feigl foi revisada para admitir que muitos estados físicos do cérebro podem produzir o mesmo estado
mental.
Outra forma de materialismo (materialismo "eliminativo") originou-se de Paul Feyerabend e Richard Rorty,
que acreditavam que estados mentais não existem. O mundo mental é apenas um vocabulário de termos vagos
que não se referem a entidades reais. O dualismo mente-corpo é um falso problema que leva a falsos
problemas.
Por essa linha de raciocínio, Gilbert Ryle reviveu o behaviorismo no contexto do problema mente-corpo: o
vocabulário mental não se refere à estrutura de algo, mas simplesmente ao modo como alguém se comporta ou
se comportará. A mente "é" o comportamento do corpo. Descartes inventou um mito: a mente dentro do corpo
("o fantasma na máquina").
O existencialismo foi o grande "ismo" filosófico da Europa do pós-guerra. Existencialistas focados na

experiência humana. Deles foi uma filosofia da crise de valores. O objeto e o sujeito do existencialismo são os
mesmos: o "eu".
Jean-Paul Sartre acreditava que não há Deus. O indivíduo está sozinho. Não há predestinação (nenhuma
"natureza humana"), determinando nossas ações. Somos livres para agir como quisermos. São nossas ações que
determinam nossa natureza. A existência (o eu livre) precede a essência (a natureza do eu). No começo, o
indivíduo não é nada. Então ela se define por suas ações. Cada indivíduo é totalmente responsável pelo que ela
se torna. Essa liberdade total causa angústia. É ainda amplificado pelo fato de que as escolhas de um indivíduo
afetam toda a humanidade. O existencialismo abole Deus, mas enfatiza que seu ateísmo aumenta (não diminui)
a responsabilidade individual por suas ações. Isso complica, não simplifica, a vida moral. "Estamos sozinhos,
sem desculpas".
Maurice Merleau-Ponty respondeu que a liberdade humana nunca é total: é limitada pelo nosso corpo. O
indivíduo é, antes de tudo, um ser "situado", um corpo que vive em um ambiente. O corpo não é apenas um
objeto cercado por objetos: é o próprio sujeito da experiência, que interage com o ambiente. O corpo molda o
ambiente, mas, por sua vez, o ambiente molda o corpo, cuja liberdade é, portanto, limitada pela forma como o
ambiente o molda. O mesmo condicionamento existe na sociedade: o corpo é um ator linguístico, mas sua ação
linguística é limitada pela linguagem que ele usa (o significado de uma ação linguística é construído com base
em um significado adquirido da linguagem). Idem ao nível da sociedade: somos agentes políticos, mas as
nossas ações políticas são moldadas pelo contexto histórico.
Um número de pensadores relacionou-se com o zeitgeist do existencialismo mesmo se não pertenceram ao

mainstream dele.
David Bohm cumpriu a esperança de Einstein de encontrar "variáveis ocultas" para remover a aleatoriedade da
Teoria Quântica. Bohm hipotetizou a existência de um potencial que permeia o universo. Esse potencial, que
está além da geometria quadridimensional do espaço-tempo, gera um campo que age sobre as partículas da
mesma forma que um potencial clássico. Este campo pode ser expresso como a mãe de todas as funções de
onda, uma onda real que guia a partícula (a "onda piloto"). Este campo é, por sua vez, afetado por todas as
partículas: tudo no universo está emaranhado em tudo o mais. O universo é um todo indiviso em fluxo
constante. Da mesma forma, na dimensão superior (a "ordem implícita") não há diferença entre matéria e
mente. Essa diferença surge dentro da "ordem explicada" (o espaço-tempo convencional da Física). À medida
que viajamos para dentro, viajamos para essa dimensão mais elevada, a ordem implícita, na qual a mente e a
matéria são as mesmas. À medida que viajamos para fora, viajamos para a ordem explicada em que sujeito e
objeto estão separados. Mente e matéria nunca podem ser completamente separadas porque estão emaranhadas
no mesmo campo quântico. Assim, cada pedaço de matéria tem uma qualidade mental rudimentar.
Ghose Aurobindo especulou que Brahman primeiro involui (focaliza em si mesmo), em seguida materializa (o
universo material), e então evolui para a consciência. Nós somos parte desse processo, que ainda está
acontecendo. A consciência humana é o estágio mais elevado de consciência até agora alcançado por Brahman,
mas não o último, como provado pelo fato de que a vida social, cultural e individual no mundo humano ainda é
imperfeita.
Sayyid Qutb, o filósofo do islamismo militante, viveu no sonho de um mundo purificado dedicado à adoração
de Deus somente. As relações humanas devem ser fundadas na crença na unidade de Deus. A ignorância pagã
(por exemplo, de cristãos e judeus) é o principal mal no mundo, porque se rebela contra a vontade de Deus e
estabelece sociedades seculares que violam a soberania de Deus na Terra. A separação entre igreja e estado é
"o" problema.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin viu a evolução como uma lei geral da natureza: a matéria-energia do universo está
progredindo para uma complexidade cada vez maior. Os seres humanos marcam o estágio em que a evolução
deixa a "biosfera" e entra na "noosfera" (consciência e conhecimento). A evolução da noosfera terminará na
convergência de matéria e espírito para o "ponto ômega".
Ao longo da segunda metade do século, o estruturalismo foi um dos paradigmas dominantes da filosofia:
descobrir o significado real oculto em um sistema de signos.
Claude Lévi-Strauss estendeu-a aos fenômenos sociais, que ele considerava sistemas de signos como a
linguagem. Mitos de diferentes culturas (mitos cujos conteúdos são muito diferentes) compartilham estruturas
semelhantes. Mito é uma linguagem, feita de unidades que são combinadas de acordo com certas regras. A
"langue" é o significado intemporal do mito, a "parole" é o seu cenário histórico. "Mytheme" é a unidade
elementar do mito. Os mitemas podem ser lidos diacronicamente (o enredo que se desenrola, a sequência dos
acontecimentos) e sincronicamente (o significado intemporal dele, os "temas"). Os temas dos mitos são
relações binárias entre dois conceitos opostos (por exemplo, entre egoísmo e altruísmo). A lógica binária é, em
certo sentido, a lógica primordial e o pensamento mítico é, em certo sentido, pensamento lógico. O pensamento
mítico é inerente à mente humana: é o modo humano de entender a natureza e a condição humana. Por outro
lado, os mitos são ferramentas que podemos usar para descobrir como a mente humana funciona.
Roland Barthes transformou o estruturalismo de Saussure em "semiologia", uma ciência de signos para
desvendar o significado oculto na "langue" de sistemas culturais como o cinema, a música e a arte.
O estruturalismo muitas vezes chegou a conclusões provocativas que tiveram implicações sociais e políticas.
Michel Foucault analisou os mecanismos da sociedade ocidental (liberal, democrática). A sociedade ocidental
prega tolos que, nas sociedades ancestrais, eram tolerados ou mesmo respeitados como visionários. Foucault
percebeu como perturbador a tendência de criminalizar a força criadora da loucura. Basicamente, as sociedades
ocidentais torturam as mentes dos criminosos, enquanto as sociedades totalitárias torturaram seus corpos. As
prisões são, de fato, um instrumento de controle social, um mecanismo para treinar mentes que não obedecem
aos dogmas. Assim, as sociedades ocidentais são vastos mecanismos de repressão, não menos opressivos que
os regimes totalitários que substituíram. Argumentos semelhantes podem ser feitos para a sexualidade e o
crime.
Jacques Lacan analisou o inconsciente como um sistema de signos. Motivos são significantes que formam uma
"cadeia significante": o subconsciente "é" essa cadeia. Essa cadeia é permanentemente instável porque não se
refere a nada: o próprio eu é uma ficção do subconsciente. Um bebê nasce com uma psique unida, mas mais
tarde na vida, quando o bebê se separa da mãe, essa unidade é quebrada e o eu nasce; e o resto da vida é gasto
tentando reunir o eu e o outro. A vida psíquica como uma luta permanente entre duas "consciências".
A hermenêutica de Dilthey também foi influente. Hans-Georg Gadamer aplicou-a à Fenomenologia de Husserl
e derivou uma disciplina de "compreensão", onde "compreensão" era a "fusão de horizontes" entre um texto
passado e um intérprete presente.
Paul Ricoeur acreditava que os símbolos da cultura pré-racional (mito, religião, arte, ideologia) escondem
significados que podem ser descobertos pela interpretação. Há sempre um significado patente e latente. Uma
dicotomia semelhante afeta a vida humana, que está dividida entre as dimensões "voluntária" e "involuntária",
entre a "bios" (a vida espaço-temporal) e os "logos" (a capacidade de compreender o espaço-tempo universal).
Ele fez uma distinção entre linguagem e discurso: a linguagem é, na verdade, apenas um sistema de signos e,
portanto, atemporal, mas o discurso sempre ocorre em algum momento particular do tempo, isto é, depende do
contexto. Uma linguagem é uma condição necessária para a comunicação, mas ela própria não se comunica:
somente o discurso se comunica. Os sinais em um sistema de linguagem referem-se apenas a outros signos,
mas o discurso refere-se a um mundo. O discurso tem uma dimensão de tempo que é devido à fusão de dois
tipos diferentes de tempo: o tempo cósmico (o tempo uniforme do universo) e o tempo vivido (o tempo
descontínuo dos eventos da nossa vida). O tempo histórico harmoniza esses dois tipos de tempo.
The debate on language proceeded in multiple directions. Wilfred Sellars conceived a sort of linguistic
behaviorism: thoughts are to the linguistic behavior of linguistic agents what molecules are to the behavior of
gases.
Roman Jakobson, the leading exponent of "formalism", decomposed an act of communication into six elements
that summarize the act of communication like this: a message is sent by an addresser to an addressee who
shares a common code, a physical channel and a context. These elements reveal that communication performs
many functions in one.
The speculation on language culminated with Noam Chomsky's studies on grammar. Chomsky rephrased
Saussure's dichotomy of langue and parole as performance and competence: we understand sentences that we
have never heard before, thus our linguistic competence exceeds our linguistic performance. In fact, the
number of sentences that we can "use" is potentially infinite. Chomsky concluded that what we know is not the
infinite set of sentences of the language, but only a finite system of rules that defines how to build sentences.
We know the "grammar" of a language. Chomsky separated syntax from semantics: a sentence can be "well-
formed" without being meaningful (e.g., "the apple took the train"). In doing so, Chomsky reduced the problem
of speaking a language to a problem of formal logic (because a grammar is a formal system). Chomsky realized
that it was not realistic to presume that one learns a grammar from the sentences that one hears (a fraction of all
the sentences that are possible in a language). He concluded that human brains are designed to acquire a
language: they are equipped at birth with a "universal grammar". We speak because our brain is meant to speak.
Language "happens" to a child, just like growth. Chomsky's universal grammar is basically a "linguistic
genotype" that all humans share.
As Sellars had already noted, Chomsky's analysis of the structure of language was not enough, though, to
explain the phenomenon of language among humans. John-Langshaw Austin argued that the function of
sentences is not so much to describe the state of the world as to cause action in the world. He classified a
speaker's "performative" sentences (requests, promises, orders, etc) based not on their structure but on their
"effect" on the listener. We speak for a reason. "Pragmatics" is the study of "speech acts". A speech act is
actually made up of three components: a "locutionary" act (the words employed to deliver the utterance), an
"illocutionary" act (the type of action that it performs, such as commanding, promising, asking) and a
"perlocutionary" act (the effect that the act has on the listener, such as believing or answering).
There is more to a sentence than its meaning: a sentence is "used" for a purpose. Paul Grice realized that speech
acts work only if the listener cooperates with the speaker, and the speaker abides by some common-sense rule:
the speaker wants to be understood and cause an action, and the listener makes this assumption in trying to
understand the speaker's purpose. Grice believed that some "maxims" help the speaker say more than the word
that she is saying: those maxims are implicit knowledge that the listener uses in order to grasp the purpose of
the utterance. Language has meaning to the extent that some conventions hold within the linguistic community.
The intimidating progress of Science caused a backlash of sort among philosophers who disputed Science's
very foundations. After all, scientific hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation from the whole theoretical
network within which they are formulated.
Aleksandr Koyre' and Gaston Bachelard had already noted that scientific progress is not linear: it occurs in
spurts. Thomas Kuhn formalized that intuition with the concept of "paradigm shifts". At any point in time the
scientific community agrees on a scientific paradigm. New evidence tends to be accomodated in the ruling
paradigm. When the ruling paradigm collapses because of some evidence that cannot be accomodated, then a
paradigm shift occurs. A paradigm shift results in a different way of looking at the world, analogous to a
religious conversion. Scientific revolutions are, ultimately, linguistic in character. Thus the truth of a theory
does not depend exclusively on the correspondence with reality. The history of science is the history of the
transformations of scientific language.
Willard Quine argued that a hypothesis can be verified true or false only relative to some background
assumptions, a condition that rapidly becomes recursive: each statement in a theory partially determines the
meaning of every other statement in the same theory. One builds a "web of beliefs", and each belief in the web
is based on some other beliefs of the same web. Each belief contributes to support the entire web and is
supported by the entire web. The web as a whole fits the requirements of Science. But there might be several
such webs that would work as well: scientific theories are "undetermined" by experience. It is the same
situation as with language: there are always many (potentially infinite) interpretations of a discourse depending
on the context. A single word has no meaning: its meaning is always relative to the other words that it is
associated to. The meaning of a sentence depends on the interpretation of the entire language. Its meaning can
even change in time. For example, it is impossible to define what a "correct" translation of a sentence is from
one language to another, because that depends on the interpretations of both entire languages. Translation from
one language to another is indeterminate. Translation is possible only from the totality of one language to the
totality of another language.
Another strong current of thinkers was the Marxist one, which frequently spent more time criticizing capitalism
than in heralding socialism.
Juergen Habermas added an element that was missing from Marx's "materialistic" treatment of society: social
interaction, the human element. Societies rely both on labor (instrumental action) and socialization
(communicative action). What we are witnessing is not so much alienation but a crisis of institutions that
manipulate individuals. Communicative Action, not the revolution of the proletariat, can transform the world
and achieve a more humane and just society based on free and unconditioned debate among equal citizens.
Herbert Marcuse analyzed the operation of mass societies and concluded that they seduce the citizens with the
dream of individual liberty only to enslave them in a different way. The only true revolution is emancipation
from the economic loop that enslaves us. Such a revolution would bring about an ideal state in which
technology is used to provide individual happiness, not surplus.
Theodor Adorno warned that reason has come to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself, and
therefore Western civilization is moving towards self-destruction. For example, mass-culture industries
manipulate the masses into cultivating false needs.
Cinema was probably the most faithful interpreter of the times through its well-established genres: Akira
Kurosawa's "Rashomon" (1950), Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), Vittorio DeSica's "Miracle in
Milan" (1951), Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953), Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Monogatari" (1953),
Elia Kazan's "On The Waterfront" (1954), Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal" (1956), John Ford's "The
Searchers" (1956), Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956), Alfred Hitchcock's "North By
Northwest" (1959), Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1959), Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" (1960), John
Huston's "The Misfits" (1961), Robert Aldrich's "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" (1965), Michelangelo
Antonioni's "Blow-Up" (1966), Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour" (1967), Roman Polansky's "Rosemary's Baby"
(1968), Stanley Kubrick's "2001 A Space Odyssey" (1968), Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in The West"
(1968), Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" (1969).
Music moved further away from the tradition of consonant music with John Cage's "Concerto for Prepared
Piano" (1951), Pierre Boulez's "Le Marteau Sans Maitre" (1954), Luigi Nono's "Canto Sospeso" (1956),
Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" (1956), Iannis Xenakis's "Orient Occident" (1960), Britten's
"War Requiem" (1962), Penderecki's "Passio Secundum Lucam" (1965), Berio's "Sinfonia" (1968).
Poetry explored a much broader universe of forms: Pablo Neruda's "Canto General" (1950), Andrade's "Claro
Enigma" (1951), Paul Celan's "Mohn und Gedaechtnis" (1952), George Seferis's "Emerologio Katastromatos"
(1955), Yannis Ritsos's "Moonlight Sonata" (1956), Ezra Pound's "Cantos" (1960), Pierpaolo Pasolini's "Le
Ceneri di Gramsci" (1957), Vladimir Holan's "A Night with Hamlet" (1964), Vittorio Sereni's "Gli Strumenti
Umani" (1965), Andrea Zanzotto's "La Belta`" (1968).
Fiction was the most prolific of the literary genres: Cesare Pavese's "La Luna e i Falo'" (1950), Elsa Morante's
"L'Isola di Arturo" (1957), Italo Calvino's "Il Barone Rampante" (1957), Carlo-Emilio Gadda's "La Cognizione
del Dolore" (1963), Alejo Carpentier's "Los Pasos Perdidos" (1953), Jose Donoso's "Coronacion" (1957),
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Ciento Anos de Soledad" (1967), Malcom Lowry's "Under the volcano" (1947),
William Gaddis' "The Recognitions" (1955), Wilson Harris' "Palace of the Peacock" (1960), Anthony Burgess's
"Clockwork Orange" (1962), Janet Frame's "Scented Gardens For The Blind" (1963), Saul Bellow's "Herzog"
(1964), John Barth's "Giles Goat Boy" (1966), Yukio Mishima's "Golden Pavillion" (1956), Boris Pasternak's
"Doctor Zivago" (1957), Witold Gombrowicz's "Pornography" (1960), Gunther Grass' "Die Brechtrommel"
(1959), Thomas Bernhard's "Verstoerung" (1967), Elias Canetti's "Auto da fe" (1967), Raymond Queneau's
"Zazie dans le Metro" (1959), Julio Cortazar's "Rayuela" (1963), Carlos Fuentes's "Artemio Cruz" (1964),
Jorge Amado's "Dona Flor" (1966), Kobe Abe's "Woman of Sand" (1962), Kenzaburo Oe's "Silent Cry" (1967),
Patrick White (Australia, 1912): "Voss" (1957).
Theatre built upon the innovations of the first half of the century: Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named
Desire" (1947), Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" (1949), Samuel Beckett (1906, Ireland): "En Attendant
Godot" (1952), Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921, Switzerland): "The Visit of the Old Lady" (1956), Max Frisch
(1911): "Herr Biedermann und die Brandstifter" (1958), Harold Pinter (1930, Britain): "Caretaker" (1959),
Eugene Ionesco (1912): "Rhinoceros" (1959), John Arden's "Serjeant Musgrave's Dance" (1959), Peter Weiss
(1916): "Marat/Sade" (1964).
An epoch-defining moment was the landing on the Moon by USA astronauts, an event that ideally ended the
decade of the boom.
If the Moon landing had seemed to herald complete domination by the USA, the events of the following decade
seemed to herald its decline. The USA was defeated militarily in Vietnam (1975), Lebanon (1983) and Somalia
(1992). The oil crisis of the 1970s created a world-wide economic crisis. The USA lost one of its main allies,
Iran, to an Islamic revolution (1979), that was as significant for the political mood of the Middle East as
Nasser's Arab nationalism had been for the previous generation. After 30 years of rapid growth, both Japan and
Germany became economic powers that threatened the USA globally. Both countrie caught up with the USA in
terms of average wealth. Militarily, the Soviet Union remained a formidable global adversary, extending its
political influence to large areas of the developed world.
Other problems of the age were drugs and AIDS. The culture of drugs and the holocaust of AIDS marked the
depressed mood of the arts. Soon, another alarming term would surfance in the apocalyptic language: global
warming.
However, space exploration continued, still propelled by the desire of the USA and the Soviet Union to
compete anytime anywhere. In 1970 and 1971 the Soviet Union sent spacecrafts to our neighbors, Venus and
Mars. In 1977 the USA launched the Voyager to reach other galaxies. In 1981 the U.S.A launched the first
space shuttle. In 1986 the Soviet Union launched the permanent space station "MIR". In 1990 the USA
launched the Hubble space telescope.
Computers staged another impressive conceptual leap by reaching the desk of ordinary folks: the micro-
processor (1971) enabled the the first "personal" computer (1974) which became ubiquitous from 1981 on.
As mass-media became more pervasive, they also changed format: the video-cassette recorder (1971), the
cellular telephone (1973), the portable stereo (1979), the compact disc (1981), the DVD (1995). Ultimately,
these innovations made both entertainment, communication and culture more "personal" and more "portable".
Classical music reflected the complex world of the crisis with Dmitrij Shostakovic's "Symphony 15" (1971),
Morton Feldman's "Rothko Chapel" (1971), Gyorgy Ligeti's "Double Concerto" (1972), Henryk Gorecki's
"Symphony 3" (1976), Arvo Part's "De Profundis" (1980), Witold Lutoslaski's "Symphony 3" (1983).
The novel continued to experiment with newer and newer formats and structures: Vladimir Nabokov's "Ada"
(1969), Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970), Ismail Kadare's "Chronicle in Stone" (1971), Danilo
Kis's "Hourglass" (1972), Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973), Nadine Gordimer's "The Burger's
Daughter" (1979), Barbara Pym's "Quartet in Autumn" (1977), Manuel Puig's "El Beso de la Mujer Arana"
(1976), Mario Vargas-Llosa's "La Tia Julia" (1978), Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (1980), Elfriede
Jelinek's "Die Ausgesperrten" (1980), Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby" (1981), Uwe Johnson's "Jahrestage" (1983),
Jose Saramago's "Ricardo Reis" (1984). Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1985), Joseph
McElroy's "Women and Men" (1987), Antonia Byatt's "Possession" (1990), Winfried Georg Sebald's "Die
Ausgewanderten" (1992).
Poetry was becoming more philosophical through works such as Joseph Brodsky's "Stop in the Desert" (1970),
Mario Luzi's "Su Fondamenti Invisibili" (1971), Derek Walcott's "Another Life"" (1973), Edward-Kamau
Brathwaite's "The Arrivants" (1973), Giorgio Caproni's "Il Muro della Terra" (1975), John Ashbery's "Self-
Portrait in a Convex Mirror: (1975), James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover (1982).
By now, cinema was even more international than literature: John Boorman's "Zardoz" (1973), Martin
Scorsese's "Mean Streets" (1973), Francis-Ford Coppola's "The Godfather Part II" (1974), Robert Altman's
"Nashville" (1975), Theodoros Anghelopulos's "Traveling Players" (1975), Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900"
(1976), Terence Malick's "Days of Heaven" (1978), Ermanno Olmi's "L'Albero degli Zoccoli" (1978), Woody
Allen's "Manhattan" (1979), Andrej Tarkovskij's "Stalker" (1979), Istvan Szabo's "Mephisto" (1981), Peter
Greenaway's "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982), Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" (1982), Terry Gilliam's
"Brazil" (1985), Wim Wenders's "Wings of Desire" (1988), Zhang Yimou's "Hong Gaoliang" (1987), Aki
Kaurismaki's "Leningrad Cowboys go to America" (1989), Tsui Hark's "Wong Fei-hung" (1991), Takeshi
Kitano's "Sonatine" (1993), Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Rouge" (1994), Bela Tarr's "Satantango/ Satan's Tango"
(1994), Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" (1994), Jean-Marie Jeunet's "City of Lost Children" (1995), Lars
Von Trier's "The Kingdom" (1995), Emir Kusturica's "Underground" (1995), Jan Svankmajer's "Conspirators of
Pleasure" (1996), David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), Manuel de Oliveira's "Viagem ao Principio do
Mundo" (1997), Hirokazu Kore-eda's "The Afterlife" (1998).
Physics was striving for grand unification theories. Both the "Big Bang" model and the theory of elementary
particles had been successful examples of hybrid Quantum and Relativity theories, but, in reality, the quantum
world and the relativistic world had little in common. One viewed the world as discrete, the other one viewed
the world as continuous. One admitted indeterminacy, the other one was rigidly deterministic. One interpreted
the weak, strong and electromagnetic forces as exchanges of virtual particles, the other one interpreted the
gravitational force as space-time warping. Given the high degree of success in predicting the results of
experiments, the two theories were surprisingly difficult to reconcile. Attempts to merge them (such as
"Superstring Theory") generally led to odd results.
Skepticism affected philosophers. Paul Feyerabend argued that the history of science proceeds by chance:
science is a hodgepodge of more or less casual theories. And it is that way because the world is that way: the
world does not consist of one homogeneous substance but of countless kinds, that cannot be "reduced" to one
another. Feyerabend took the Science of his time literally: there is no evidence that the world has a single,
coherent and complete nature.
Richard Rorty held that any theory is inevitably conditioned by the spirit of its age. The goal of philosophy and
science is not to verify if our propositions agree with reality but to create a vocabulary to express what we think
is reality. Facts do not exist independently of the way we describe them with words. Thus science and
philosophy are only genres of literature.
Another sign that a new era had started was the decline of Structuralism. Jacques Derrida accused Structuralism
of confusing "being" and "Being", the code and the transcendental reality. Language is also a world in which
we live. In fact, there are multiple legitimate interpretations of a text, multiple layers of meaning. Language is
constantly shifting. He advocated deciphering the "archi-escriture" ("deconstruction" or "differance").
France after World War II provided the ideal stage for a frontal critique of the rationalist tradition founded by
Descartes and publicized by the Enlightenment that views reason as the source of knowledge and knowledge as
the source of progress. "Modernism" had been based on the implicit postulate that progress founded on science
is good, and that reason applied to society leads to a better (e.g. egalitarian) social order. The pessimistic views
of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein
escalated as modern society revealed the dark sides of rapid economic growth, industrialization, urbanization,
consumerism, of the multiplying forms of communication and information, of globalization. Technology and
media on one hand democratize knowledge and culture but on the other hand introduce new forms of
oppression. The earliest forms of reaction to modernism had manifested themselves in Bohemian lifestyles,
subcultures such as Dadaism, anticapitalist ideologies, phenomenology and existentialism. But it was becoming
more and move self-evident that perception of the object by the subject is mediated by socially-constructed
discourse, that heterogeneity and fragmentation make more sense than the totalization of culture attempted by
modernism, and that the distinction of high-culture and low-culture was artificial. The post-modernist ethos
was born: science and reason were no longer viewed as morally good; multiple sources of power and
oppression were identified in capitalist society; education no longer trusted as unbiased but seen as politicized;
etc. Realizing that knowledge is power, the postmodernist generation engaged in political upheavals such as
student riots (Berkeley 1964, Paris 1968), adopted mottos such as "power to the imagination" and identified the
bourgeoisie as the problem. For postmodernism the signifier is more important than the signified; meaning is
unstable (at any point in time the signified is merely a step in a never-ending process of signification); meaning
is in fact socially constructed; there are no facts, only interpretations.
Guy Debord argued that the "society of the spectacle" masks a condition of alienation and oppression. Gilles
Deleuze opted for "rhizomatic" thought (dynamic, heterogeneous, chaotic) over the "arborescent thought"
(hierarchical, centralized, deterministic) of modernism.
Felix Guattari speculatd that there is neither a subject nor an object of desire, just desire as the primordial force
that shapes society and history; a micropolitics of desire that replace Nietsche's concept of the "power to will".
In his bold synthesis of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche ("schizoanalysis") the subject is a nomadic desiring
machine.
Jean-Francois Lyotard was "incredulous" towards Metaphysics (towards "metanarratives") because he viewed
the rational self (capable of analyzing the world) as a mere fiction. The self, like language, is a layer of
meanings that can be contradictory. Instead of "grand narratives", that produce knowledge for its own sake, he
preferred mini-narratives that are "provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative"; in other words, a
fragmentation of beliefs and values instead of the grand unification theories of Metaphysics.
Jean Baudrillard painted the picture of a meanigless society of signs in which the real and the simulation are
indistinguishable. The transformation from a "metallurgic" society to a "semiurgic" society (a society satured
with artificial signs) leads to an implostion in all directions, an implosion of boundaries (eg politics becomes
entertainment). More importantly, the boundary between the real and the simulation becomes blurred.
Technology, economics and the media create a world of simulacra. The simulation can even become more real
than the real (hyper-real). Post-modern society is replacing reality with a simulated reality of symbols and
signs. At the same time meaning has been lost in a neutral sterile flow of information, entertainment and
marketing. The postmodern person is the victim of an accelerating proliferation of signs that destroys meaning;
of a global process of destruction of meaning. The postmodern world is meaningless, it is a reservoir of
nihilism. In fact, the accelerating proliferation of goods has created a world in which objects rule subjects:
"Things have found a way to elude the dialectic of meaning, a dialectic which bored them: they did this by
infinite proliferation". The only metaphysics that makes sense is a metaphysics of the absurd like Jarry's
pataphysics.
However, the topic that dominated intellectual life at the turn of the millennium and that fostered the first truly
interdisciplinary research (involving Neurology, Psychology, Biology, Mathematics, Linguistics, Physics) was:
the brain. It was Descartes' mind-body problem recast in the age of the neuron: who are we? Where does our
mind come from? Now that new techniques allowed scientists to study the minutiae of neural processes the
ambition became to reconstruct how the brain produces behavior and how the brain produces consciousness.
Consciousness became a veritable new frontier of science.
The fascination with consciousness could already be seen in Julian Jaynes' theory that it was a relatively recent
phenomenon, that ancient people did not "think" they way we think today. He argued that the characters in the
oldest parts of the Homeric epics and of the Ancient Testament were largely "non-conscious": their mind was
"bicameral", two minds that spoke to each other, as opposed to one mind being aware of itself. Those humans
were guided by "hallucinations" (such as gods) that formed in the right hemisphere of the brain and that
communicated to the left hemisphere of the brain, that received them as commands. Language did not serve as
conscious thought: it served as communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. The bicameral mind
began "breaking down" when the hallucinated voices no longer provided "automatic" guidance for survival. As
humans lost faith in gods, they "invented" consciousness.
A major revolution in the understanding of the brain was started, indirectly, by the theory of the immune
system advanced by Niels Jerne, which viewed the immune system as a Darwinian system. The immune
system routinely manufactures all the antibodies it will ever need. When the body is attacked by foreign
antigens the appropriate antibodies are "selected" and "rewarded" over the antibodies that are never used.
Instead of an immune system that "designs" the appropriate antibody for the current invader, Jerne painted the
picture of a passive repertory of antibodies that the environment selects. The environment is the actor. Jerne
speculated that a similar paradigm might be applied to the mind: mind manufactures chaotic mental events that
the environment orders into thought. The mind already knows the solution to all the problems that can occur in
the environment in which it evolved over millions of years. The mind knows what to do, but it is the
environment that selects what it actually does.
Neurologists such as Michael Gazzaniga cast doubt on the role of consciousness. He observed that the brain
seems to contain several independent brain systems working in parallel, possibly evolutionary additions to the
nervous system. Basically, a mind is many minds that coexist in a confederation. A module located in the left
hemisphere interprets the actions of the other modules and provides explanations for our behavior: that is what
we feel as "consciousness". If that is the case, than our "commands" do not precede action, they follow it. First
our brain orders an action, then we become aware of having decided it. There are many "I"'s and there is one
"I" that makes sense of what all the other "I"'s are doing: we are aware only of this "verbal self", but it is not
the one in charge.
A similar picture was painted by Daniel Dennett, who believed the mind is due to competition between several
parallel narrative "drafts": at every point in time, there are many drafts active in the brain, and we are aware
only of the one that is dominant at that point in time. There is, in fact, no single stream of consciousness. The
continuity of consciousness is an illusion.
Jerne's theory was further developed by Gerald Edelman, who noticed that the human genome alone cannot
specify the complex structure of the brain, and that individual brains are wildly diverse. The reason, in his
opinion, is that the brain develops by Darwinian competition: connections between neurons and neural groups
are initially under-determined by the genetic instructions. As the brain is used to deal with the environment,
connections are strengthened or weakened based on their success or failure in dealing with the world. Neural
groups "compete" to respond to environmental stimuli ("Neural Darwinism"). Each brain is different because
its ultimate configuration depends on the experiences that it encounters during its development. The brain is not
a direct product of the information contained in the genome: it uses much more information that is available in
the genome, i.e. information from the environment. As it lives, the brain continuously reorganizes itself. Thus
brain processes are dynamic and stochastic. The brain is not an "instructional" system but a "selectional"
system.
The scenario of many minds competing for control was further refined by William Calvin, who held that a
Darwinian process in the brain finds the best thought among the many that are continuously produced. A neural
pattern copies itself repeatedly around a region of the brain, in a more or less random manner. The ones that
"survive" (that are adequate to act in the world) reproduce and mutate. "Thoughts" are created randomly,
compete and evolve subconsciously. Our current thought is simply the dominant pattern in the copying
competition. A "cerebral code" (the brain equivalent of the genetic code) drives reproduction, variation and
selection of thoughts.
Paul MacLean introduced the view of the human brain as three brains in one, each brain corresponding to a
different stage of evolution: the "reptilian" brain for instinctive behavior (mostly the autonomic system), the
"old mammalian" brain for emotions that are functional to survival (mostly the limbic systemi) and the "new
mammalian" brain for higher cognitive functions (basically, the neo-cortex). Mechanical behavior, emotional
behavior and rational behavior arose chronologically and now coexist and complement each other.
Merlin Donald viewed the development of the human mind in four stages: the "episodic" mind, that is limited
to stimulus-response associations and cannot retrieve memories without environmental cues (lives entirely in
the present); the "mimetic" mind, capable of motor-based representations and of retrieving memories
independently of environmental cues (understands the world, communicates and makes tools; the "mythic"
mind, that constructs narratives and creates myths; and the "theoretical" mind, capable of manipulating
symbols.
Steven Mithen identified four "modules" in the brain, which evolved independently and represent four kinds of
intelligence: social intelligence (the ability to deal with other humans), natural-history intelligence (the ability
to deal with the environment), tool-using intelligence and linguistic intelligence. The hunters-gatherers of pre-
history were experts in all these domains, but those differente kinds of expertise did not mix. For thousands of
years these different skillsets had been separated. Mithen speculates that the emergence of self-awareness
caused the integration of these kinds of intelligence ("cognitive fluidity") that led to the cultural explosion of
art, technology, farming, religion.
The role of a cognitive system in the environment was analyzed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
They believed that living beings are units of interaction, and that cognition is embodied action (or "enaction").
Organisms survive by "autopoiesis", the process by which an organism continuously reorganizes its own
structure to maintain a stable relationship with the environment. A living being cannot be understood
independently of its environment, because it is that relationship that molds its cognitive life. Conversely, the
world is "enacted" from the actions of living beings. Thus living beings and environment mutually specify each
other. Life is an elegant dance between the organism and the environment, and the mind is "the tune of that
dance".
Wilson-Edward Osborne, the founder of "sociobiology", applied the principles of Darwinian evolution to
behavior, believing that the social behavior of animals and humans can be explained from the viewpoint of
evolution.
Richard Dawkins pointed out that one can imagine a Darwinian scenario also for the evolution of ideas, which
he called "memes". A meme is something that infects a mind (a tune, a slogan, an ideology, a religion) in such
a way that the mind feels the urge to communicate it to other minds, thus contributing to spreading it. As
memes migrate from mind to mind, they replicate, mutate and evolve. Meme are the cultural counterpart of
genes. A meme is the unit of cultural evolution, just like a gene is the unit of biological evolutionJust like genes
use bodies as vehicles to spread, so memes use minds as vehicles to spread. The mind is a machine for copying
memes, just like the body is a machine for copying genes. Memes have created the mind, not the other way
around.
Dawkins held the view that Darwinian evolution was driven by genes, not by bodies. It is genes that want to
live forever, and that use bodies for that purpose. To Dawkins, evolution is nothing but a very sophisticated
strategy for genes to survive. What survives is not my body but my genes.
Dawkins also called attention to the fact that the border of a "body" (or, better, phenotype) is not so obvious: a
spider would not exist without its cobweb. Dawkins' "extended phenotype" includes the world that an organism
interacts with. The organism alone is an oversimplification, and does not really have biological relevance. The
control of an organism is never complete inside and null outside: there is a continuum of degrees of control,
which allows partiality of control inside (e.g., parasites operate on the nervous system of their hosts) and an
extension of control outside (as in the cobweb). What makes biological sense is an interactive system
comprising the organism and its neighbors. The very genome of a cell can be viewed as a representation of the
environment inside the cell.
Stuart Kauffman and others saw "self-organization" as a general property of the universe. Both living beings
and brains are examples of self-organizing systems. Evolution is a process of self-organization. The
spontaneous emergence of order, or self-organization of complex systems, is ubiquitous in nature. Kauffman
argued that self-organization is the fundamental force that counteracts the universal drift towards disorder. Life
was not only possible and probable, but almost inevitable.
Linguistics focused on metaphor as more than a poetic tool. George Lakoff argued that language is grounded in
our bodily experience, that language is "embodied". Our bodily experience creates our concepts. Syntax is
created by our bodily experience. The "universal" grammar shared by all humans is due to the fact that we all
share roughly the same bodily experience. The process by which we create concepts out of bodily experience is
metaphor, the process of experiencing something in terms of something else. The entire human conceptual
system is metaphorical, because a concepts can always be understood in terms of less abstract concepts, all the
way down to our bodily experience. No surprise that we understand the world through metaphors, and we do so
without any effort, automatically and unconsciously. Lakoff held that language was created to deal with
physical objects, and later extended to non-physical objects by means of metaphors. Thus metaphor is
biological: our brains are built for metaphorical thought.
Dreams continued to fascinate neurologists such as Allan Hobson and Jonathan Winson, as new data showed
that the brain was "using" sleep to consolidate memories. Dreams are a window on the processing that goes on
in the brain while we sleep. The brain is rapidly processing a huge amount of information, and our
consciousness sees flashes of the bits that are being processed. The brain tries to interpret these bits as
narratives, but, inevitably, they look "weird". In reality, there is no story in a dream: it is just a parade of
information that is being processed. During REM sleep the brain processes information that accumulated
during the day. Dreams represent "practice sessions" in which animals refine their survival skills. Early
mammals had to perform all their "reasoning" on the spot. Modern brains have invented a way to "postpone"
processing sensory information.
Colin McGinn was skeptic that any of this could lead to an explanation of what consciousness is and how it is
produced by the brain. He argued that we are not omnipotent: like any other organisms, there may be things
that we just can't conceive. Maybe consciousness just does not belong to the "cognitive closure" of our
organism. In other words, understanding our consciousness is beyond our cognitive capacities.
The search for consciousness inside the brain took an unexpected turn when a mysterious biorhythm of about
40 Hertz was detected inside the brain. The traditional model for consciousness was "space-based binding":
there must be a place inside the brain where perceptions, sensations, memories and so forth get integrated into
the "feeling" of my consciousness.
Thus Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio hypothesized mechanisms by which regions of the brain could
synthesize degrees of consciousness. Damasio realized that the "movie in the mind" consciousness caused by
the flow of sensory inputs was not enough to explain self-awareness. He believed that "Self" consciousness
reqired a topography of the body and a topography of the environment, that ultimately the "self" originated
from its juxtaposition against the "non-self". An "owner" and "observer" of the movie is created within a
second-order narrative of the self interacting with the non-self. The self is continuously reconstructed via this
interaction. The "I" is not telling the story: the "I" is created by stories told in the mind.
Francis Crick launched the opposite paradigm ("time-based binding") when he speculated that synchronized
firing (the 40 Hertz biorhythm) in the region connecting the thalamus and the cortex might "be" a person's
consciousness. Instead of looking for a "place" where the integration occurs, Crick and others started looking
for integration in "time". Maybe consciousness arises from the continuous dialogue between regions of the
brain.
Rodolfo Llinas noticed a possible implication of this viewpoint. It looks like neurons are active all the time. We
do not control our neurons, no more than we control our blood circulation. In fact, neurons are always active,
even when there are no inputs. Neurons operate at their own pace, regardless of the pace of information. A
rhythmic system controls their activity, just like rhythmic systems control heartbeat or breathing. It seems that
neurons are telling the body to move even when the body is not moving. Neurons generate behavior all the
time, but only some behavior actually takes place. It sounds like Jerne's model all over again: it is the
environment that selects which movement the body will actually perform. Consciousness is a side-effect: the
thalamus calls out all cortex cells that are active, and the response "is" consciousness.
How consciousness was produced by evolution was a fascinating mystery in itself. Graham Cairns-Smith
turned the conventional model upside down when he claimed that emotions came first. A rudimentary system
of feelings was born by accident during evolution. That system proved to be useful for survival, and therefore
evolved. The organism was progressively flooded with emotions until a "stream of consciousness" appeared.
Language allowed to express it in sounds and thoughts instead of mere facial expressions. Then the conscious
"I" was born.
O Muro de Berlim caiu em 1989 e a União Soviética foi dissolvida em 1991, dois anos depois de se retirar do
Afeganistão (uma guerra demorada e debilitante). A maioria de seus satélites da Europa Oriental adotou o
modelo americano (democracia e capitalismo) e candidatou-se a membros tanto da OTAN (aliança militar
liderada pelos EUA) quanto da União Européia (a união econômica originalmente patrocinada pela Itália,
França e Alemanha, que agora incluía também Grã-Bretanha e Espanha). Do ponto de vista dos EUA, não
apenas o inimigo (o mundo comunista) se rendeu, mas a maioria de seus aliados se tornaram amigos dos EUA.
Quase da noite para o dia, o mundo inteiro adotou o modelo americano. O efeito "dominó" que os EUA temiam
propagaria o comunismo ocorreu na direção oposta: no momento em que a União Soviética caiu, quase todos
os países do mundo abandonaram o comunismo e adotaram o modelo econômico e político americano. As
reformas democráticas removeram os ditadores da América Latina, do Extremo Oriente e (mais tarde) da
África. As exceções eram raras (Cuba na América Latina, Birmânia e Coréia do Norte no Extremo Oriente,
Zimbábue na África subequatorial). Havia apenas duas exceções notáveis. Sob a administração de Deng
Xiaoping (que tomou o poder em 1978), a própria China embarcou em reformas econômicas
pseudocapitalistas, mas o sistema de partido único permaneceu no lugar e manteve rígido controle sobre a
liberdade de expressão. O mundo árabe, do Marrocos ao Iraque, da Síria ao Iêmen e seus vizinhos do leste, Irã
e Afeganistão, provavelmente eram governados pelos regimes mais totalitários. As reformas democráticas
removeram os ditadores da América Latina, do Extremo Oriente e (mais tarde) da África. As exceções eram
raras (Cuba na América Latina, Birmânia e Coréia do Norte no Extremo Oriente, Zimbábue na África
subequatorial). Havia apenas duas exceções notáveis. Sob a administração de Deng Xiaoping (que tomou o
poder em 1978), a própria China embarcou em reformas econômicas pseudocapitalistas, mas o sistema de
partido único permaneceu no lugar e manteve rígido controle sobre a liberdade de expressão. O mundo árabe,
do Marrocos ao Iraque, da Síria ao Iêmen e seus vizinhos do leste, Irã e Afeganistão, provavelmente eram
governados pelos regimes mais totalitários. As reformas democráticas removeram os ditadores da América
Á
Latina, do Extremo Oriente e (mais tarde) da África. As exceções eram raras (Cuba na América Latina,
Birmânia e Coréia do Norte no Extremo Oriente, Zimbábue na África subequatorial). Havia apenas duas
exceções notáveis. Sob a administração de Deng Xiaoping (que tomou o poder em 1978), a própria China
embarcou em reformas econômicas pseudocapitalistas, mas o sistema de partido único permaneceu no lugar e
manteve rígido controle sobre a liberdade de expressão. O mundo árabe, do Marrocos ao Iraque, da Síria ao
Iêmen e seus vizinhos do leste, Irã e Afeganistão, provavelmente eram governados pelos regimes mais
totalitários. Havia apenas duas exceções notáveis. Sob a administração de Deng Xiaoping (que tomou o poder
em 1978), a própria China embarcou em reformas econômicas pseudocapitalistas, mas o sistema de partido
único permaneceu no lugar e manteve rígido controle sobre a liberdade de expressão. O mundo árabe, do
Marrocos ao Iraque, da Síria ao Iêmen e seus vizinhos do leste, Irã e Afeganistão, provavelmente eram
governados pelos regimes mais totalitários. Havia apenas duas exceções notáveis. Sob a administração de Deng
Xiaoping (que tomou o poder em 1978), a própria China embarcou em reformas econômicas
pseudocapitalistas, mas o sistema de partido único permaneceu no lugar e manteve rígido controle sobre a
liberdade de expressão. O mundo árabe, do Marrocos ao Iraque, da Síria ao Iêmen e seus vizinhos do leste, Irã
e Afeganistão, provavelmente eram governados pelos regimes mais totalitários.
Além dessas exceções, o mundo estava sendo moldado em grande parte após o exemplo dos EUA. O que tinha
sido um caldeirão pitoresco (principalmente um experimento demográfico) havia se tornado uma máquina
econômica e militar altamente eficiente, agora imitada em todo o planeta.
A adoção do mesmo modelo econômico favoreceu a criação de várias zonas de livre comércio e a criação de
uma "aldeia global".
Os anos 90 foram em grande parte uma década de boom econômico e paz (relativa) (a África é o palco da
maioria das guerras remanescentes).
Os EUA encontraram-se ao leme de uma estrutura estranha. Definitivamente não era um "império", já que cada
país mantinha muita independência e todo país se tornava um feroz competidor dos EUA, mas ao mesmo
tempo. Ela havia assumido uma missão revolucionária (não imperial) para disseminar a democracia liberal em
todo o mundo. Ele lutou em guerras que foram mais liberais do que guerras de expansão. Seus inimigos eram
os inimigos da democracia liberal (nazismo, fascismo, comunismo, fundamentalismo islâmico). Era, antes de
tudo, um império do conhecimento: 75% de todos os ganhadores do prêmio Nobel em ciências, economia e
medicina estavam fazendo pesquisas nos EUA.
Como os dois países do mundo não foram mais obrigados a escolher entre os EUA e o campo soviético, alguns
deles conseguiram independência suficiente para exercer influência regional significativa. As novas potências
regionais incluíram a União Européia (que continuou crescendo em tamanho e ambição), China, Índia (a maior
democracia do mundo), Japão, Brasil, Nigéria e África do Sul. Por último, mas não menos importante, havia a
Rússia, com a intenção de se reconstruir como um país não comunista.
Houve uma mudança significativa do Oceano Atlântico para o Oceano Pacífico, à medida que o Japão, a China,
a Coréia do Sul, a Indochina, a Austrália e a Índia se tornaram mais e mais relevantes, enquanto a Europa
Ocidental estava se tornando menos e menos relevante. O produto bruto combinado dos países da Ásia-Pacífico
aumenta de 7,8% do PIB mundial em 1960 para 16,4% em 1982 e para mais de 20% em 2000.
O fundamentalismo islâmico não era fácil de definir como uma entidade política, mas, aproveitando o exemplo
do estado islâmico iraniano e os fundos provenientes dos estados petrolíferos, conseguiu sequestrar um país, o
próprio Afeganistão que havia contribuído para a queda do regime soviético. União.
Depois de uma crise na década de 1970, que provara ao mundo inteiro como a oferta de petróleo era crucial
para a economia mundial, o Oriente Médio havia se tornado uma área estratégica acima e além do alcance da
Guerra Fria. Com o fim da Guerra Fria, o Oriente Médio tornou-se um lugar ainda mais perigoso porque sua
dinâmica oculta ficou mais evidente: uma combinação mortal de regimes totalitários, fundamentalismo
islâmico, conflito palestino-israelense e enormes reservas de petróleo. Uma demonstração prática veio com a
"Guerra do Golfo", em que uma grande coalizão liderada pelos EUA repeliu uma invasão iraquiana do Kuwait.
A sociedade ocidental estava sendo dominada pela automação, da esfera do lar à esfera da ciência. A principal
novidade da década de 1990 foi a Internet, que, criada em 1985, tornou-se uma nova ferramenta de
comunicação e difusão do conhecimento, graças ao correio eletrônico ("e-mail") e à "World Wide Web". Esta
era uma paisagem completamente nova, não muito diferente da paisagem que os exploradores do século 16
tinham que enfrentar. De repente, as empresas tiveram que lidar com vírus de computador que se espalharam
pela Internet e as pessoas puderam encontrar virtualmente quantidades ilimitadas de informações sobre
praticamente qualquer assunto por meio dos "mecanismos de busca". Os efeitos da Internet também foram
visíveis na economia dos EUA: ela alimentou em grande parte o boom da década de 1990, incluindo a bolha do
mercado de ações (a bolha "pontocom").
A outra tecnologia emergente era engenharia genética. Tendo explicado como a vida funciona, os humanos
começaram a mexer com ela. O primeiro animal geneticamente modificado foi produzido em 1988, seguido em
1994 pelo primeiro vegetal comestível geneticamente modificado e, em 1997, pelo primeiro clone de um
mamífero. O Projeto Genoma Humano foi decifrado.
Tanto as pessoas comuns quanto a elite intelectual tinham a sensação de que viviam um tempo especial. Não é
de surpreender que os pensadores se voltem cada vez mais para a interpretação da história. Ironicamente, esse
tema autobiográfico começou quando Francis Fukuyama declarou o "fim da história", significando que o
debate ideológico havia terminado com o triunfo da democracia liberal.
John Ralston Saul criticou a globalização, que ele via como causada por um vácuo geopolítico: estados-nação
haviam sido substituídos por corporações transnacionais. O problema é que os recursos naturais e os
consumidores vivem em lugares reais.
Samuel Huntington interpretou a história do mundo dos últimos séculos como uma "Guerra Civil Ocidental",
em que as potências cristãs da Europa lutavam entre si a qualquer momento em qualquer lugar. A queda do
comunismo e o triunfo do capitalismo acabaram com a guerra civil ocidental. Agora o mundo estava se
voltando para um "choque de civilizações" (ocidental, islâmico, confuciano, japonês, hindu, eslavo-ortodoxo,
latino-americano, africano).
Assim como o pouso na Lua que parecia um bom presságio para os EUA acabou por abrir uma década de
problemas, a queda da União Soviética, que parecia outro bom presságio para os EUA, acabou por abrir outra
categoria de problemas. Em 2001, o hiperterrorismo conseguiu seu maior sucesso, derrubando aviões
seqüestrados em dois arranha-céus de Nova York. Os EUA retaliaram invadindo (e democratizando) sua base, o
Afeganistão e, em boa medida, o Iraque. O hiperterrorismo rapidamente encontrou novos alvos em todo o
mundo, da Espanha aos próprios países árabes. Longe de ter promovido uma era de paz, a queda do comunismo
abriu uma nova lata de vermes. A segunda guerra do Iraque também foi o primeiro exemplo de uma crise
dentro dos aliados europeus: Grã-Bretanha, Itália e Polônia ficaram do lado dos EUA, enquanto França e
Alemanha se opuseram fortemente à invasão liderada pelos EUA.
No novo milênio, a Ciência enfrenta vários desafios: unificar teorias quânticas e relativistas; descobrindo a
massa perdida do universo que essas teorias previram; entender como o cérebro fabrica a consciência;
decifrando o genoma; gestão de uma comunidade cada vez maior de trabalhadores do conhecimento; usando
genética para fins médicos e agrícolas; e retomar a exploração do universo.
Apêndice: A Nova Física: A Assimetria Ubíqua (physics.doc), um capítulo da Nature of Consciousness
Piero Scaruffi, dezembro de 2004
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Uma História Do Conhecimento

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Uma Breve História do Conhecimento

TM, ®, Copyright © 2011 Piero Scaruffi Todos os direitos reservados.

Other German philosophers envisioned an even more "idealistic" philosophy.

In Mathematics, George Boole resuscitated Leibniz's program of a "lingua characteristica" by applying

O eletromagnetismo de Maxwell introduziu outra mudança de paradigma: o conceito de campo (pioneiro de

A liderança intelectual, porém, estava passando para os matemáticos.

Inevitavelmente, o foco do conhecimento mudou para a psique.

Surpreendentemente, a relatividade de Einstein, que concedeu um status especial ao observador, reabriu as

In the meantime, Physics was still in a fluctuating state.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2011 Piero Scaruffi Todos os direitos reservados.

A televisão comercial introduziu formas baratas de entretenimento em massa.

A ciência foi até aplicada à própria vida.

Ilya Prigogine desenvolveu a "Termodinâmica de Não-Equilíbrio" para explicar fenômenos distantes do

O existencialismo foi o grande "ismo" filosófico da Europa do pós-guerra. Existencialistas focados na

Um número de pensadores relacionou-se com o zeitgeist do existencialismo mesmo se não pertenceram ao

Apêndice: A Nova Física: A Assimetria Ubíqua (physics.doc), um capítulo da Nature of Consciousness

Piero Scaruffi, dezembro de 2004

William McNeill: Uma História da Comunidade Humana (1987)

Home | Todos os slides | Livro | Veja os slides da aula (2014)

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