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Published in:
2012 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
8. Relational Science: Towards a Unified Theory of Nature
Authors : Robert Rosen, John J. Kineman, Ph.D.
Published in: Anticipatory Systems
Publisher: Springer New York
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Abstract
In over 300 years of science in the West we have perfected a method of “seeing” nature as a dynamical system of efficient and material causes (using the terms of natural causality established by Aristotle), constrained by the unchanging parameters (constants and metrics) of a single, universal context that supplies formal cause (which we accordingly attempt to represent in a complete mathematical structure or “formalism”). This view is generally referred to as the Newtonian, classical, or mechanistic view of nature, and it has dominated science up to the post-modern era. Aristotle’s final cause was left out of this view entirely as belonging to the realm of the mystical, and (before we accepted duality in physics) formal cause was thought to be fully describable as one closed system of logic applying to the entire universe.