Thursday, January 26, 2012

Leo Foresta on reason and intuition


Almost all university departments and research institutes are now financed directly or indirectly by big business or governments entirely controlled by multinationals through their lobbies and networks.
A key point to grasp is that the mechanistic world vision suits big business, whereas the alternative holistic subtle vision does not.
Read it at Leo Foresta on spirituality and the global crisis
Physics shedding light on the crisis (Part I)
by Leo Foresta

Holism is an extremely important trend that has been developing in the mainstream since the Sixties, when Abraham Maslow successfully overthrew B. F. Skinner's behavioral approach to psychology and established, first, humanistic psychology and then transpersonal psychology. We have come a long way since then, baby, and many people have no clue about it. 

Holism is going to one the dominant trends in this century, and it will replace mechanism. Neoclassical economics is chiefly mechanistic and it will be replaced with a holistic economic paradigm, such as suggested by E. F. Schumacher and Kenneth Boulding.

It is important to distinguish between methodological individualism and ontological individualism, between methodological holism and ontological holism, and between methodological individualism and methodological holism. Adopting a methodology does not necessarily require adopting the corresponding ontology, but it is easy to conflate methodology and ontology if one is not careful.

See also:

Wray, L. Randall. "Kenneth Boulding's Reconstruction of Macroeconomics", Review of Social Economy, vol. LV (Winter 1997): 445-463.

Wray, L. Randall. "Kenneth Boulding's Grants Economics," Journal of Economic Issues, 28 (December 1994): 1205-1225.

Wray, L. Randall. "Boulding's Balloons: A Contribution to Monetary Theory," Journal of Economic Issues, 25 (March 1991): 1-20.

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