By John Smith, Chris Jenks
Offering a critique of the humanist paradigm in modern social idea, Qualitative Complexity is the 1st entire sociological research of complexity idea. Drawing from resources in sociology, philosophy, complexity thought, 'fuzzy logic', platforms conception, cognitive technological know-how and evolutionary biology, John Smith and Chris Jenks current a brand new sequence of interdisciplinary views at the sociology of advanced, self-organizing structures.
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Extra info for Qualitative Complexity: Ecology, Cognitive Processes and the Re-Emergence of Structures in Post-Humanist Social Theory (International Library of Sociology)
Example text
Human construction is subject to ecological constraint: it does not and cannot take place in the special world of ‘humanism’ but entirely on account of the mental and physical adaptations of humankind, its technology included, and its costs. This is a position shared with the Green movement, post-Marxism, ‘world-systems theory’ and complexity oriented studies of globalisation. e. in terrestrial ecology, two things follow: they are likely to be co-influential; they cannot be said to take place within human minds, cultures, custom, language or whatever else is proposed to stand as boundaries.
Part I is intended as an extensive introduction. Its first theme will be a critical view of the founding texts of humanist philosophy, in particular the 27 T H E I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A RY F I E L D work of Descartes and Kant. We shall then contrast what we shall present as the ‘classical texts’ that prefigure complexity theory. This is not intended as a catalogue or a history (though the places to pursue such a study will be referenced) but as a presentation of key analytic requirements. Others present them differently.
It is an a priori judgement’ (Kant 1929-1973: 43, section B3). These, taken together, form Kant’s ‘criterion’ for the identification or proof of a priori ‘knowledge’; that is, a cognitive domain that precedes experience. This is the formalisation of critical procedure that we spoke about in the first paragraphs of this chapter, whilst the a priori indicates the direction of its philosophical development. It is worth unpacking these two points since they are the foundation of Kant’s enterprise and central to the idiomatic structure of epistemology and critical philosophy ever since.
