Chapter 20: Singularity, Life and Mind: New Wave Organicism Check Access

Something has gone deeply and even tragically wrong between philosophy and science since 1950, and therefore it is high time for a new and revolutionary Kuhnian paradigm-shift. Our contention in this essay is that in order to bring about this paradigm-shift, we need to re-think what A. N. Whitehead so aptly called our concept of nature itself, from the Big Bang Singularity forward to organismic life, and then on to conscious mind, including both the mind-body relation and free agency. The new and revolutionary paradigm that emerges from re-thinking our concept of nature in this way, is what we call new wave organicism. But that is not all. New wave organicism is also a grand synthesis of philosophy, the formal and natural sciences, and the arts, including both the applied arts and the fine arts. The useful function of philosophy is to promote the most general systematization of civilized thought. There is a constant reaction between specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint on specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations. By providing the generic notions philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances that rest unrealized in the womb of nature.