Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science aims to reconsider the question of for example, independence friendly logic, dialogical logics, multimodal logics.
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The definitive separation of these fields of knowledge is considered to be a condition necessary to the maintenance of accuracy and rigor of the different methodological approaches. To support this thesis, people used to quote the first edition of the well-known essay by P. According to this view, one should no longer appeal to science in its traditional forms or philosophy, or other forms of wisdom, including religion, in order to regulate human life and guide social choices. The question is not that of asking science and technology for solving all human problems, but rather that of training scientists and technicians to have a humanistic sensitivity.
Today, a similar unifying logic can perhaps be found only in the information technology of contemporary cabled societies, or in the increasingly extended logic of the global market. If the stones of the refined architecture of the Gothic cathedrals used to express a patient and meaningful synthesis of faith, geometry, and philosophy, one inspired by the belief in everlasting truths and destined to a perpetual witnessing, today the bricks that make up the information technology network of the new economy simply provide a common language, one made of changing rules and provisional structures which can be built, and quickly razed, according to the needs of the moment.
The concept of the unity of knowledge today suffers some disenchantmentand raises a certain skepticism. Present situation is quite different from the past. This also implied the convergence towards a unique deeper truth having universal characteristics. Such a vision should today confront the crisis of the notion of truth , with respect to both the epistemological and the anthropological field. Moreover, the huge growth of the process of the specialization of knowledge caused by scientific progress, seems to have made unreal any attempt towards unification.
Once the unity of knowledge is searched for or understood in this way, it seems very difficult to be put into practice. It is as difficult as thinking of the simultaneouspresence of several competencies, corresponding to a variety of scientific fields, in one person, institution or educational project. Search for unity might resemble a kind of approach as that rooted in the idealistic philosophies, aiming at compelling towards an a priori reading of all of reality, reducing it to an ideal system especially conceived to gain intellectual, political, religious or economic influence and power.
All these are quite serious objections that do not allow for an easy way out. However, with respect to the idea of the weakness of truth and the lack of trust in a knowledge that could lead to a unified vision of reality, we have to say that such a distrust also represents nothing but a philosophical vision itself. As such, it must confront reality, be subjected to rational criticism, justify its foundations, and prove it to be more legitimate than a vision which still believes that human knowledge is not wholly conventional nor merely functional, but instead capable of entering the realm of a universal truth.
With respect to the impossibility of unifying knowledge in an irreversibly fragmented culture, the presence of some trends , which seem to indicate an evolution of things in the opposite direction as discussed in this Section at nn. Moreover, an important question should be here addressed: And, if so, what could bring back such a center and such awareness? As we have seen, present times are not characterized by philosophical synthesis aimed at proposing a new unity of knowledge. Actually, it is interesting to note that such great, all-encompassing narrations seem to have moved today from the field of philosophy to that of science.
Starting from the second half of the 20th century, the tendency has been towards attempting to propose unitary visions of reality, wanting to integrate the results of the natural sciences with the great themes of human existence, including the world of values and of spiritual experiences intended here in a general sense. Scientists and researchers are often interpreters of such a new trend. Fides et Ratio , nn. No wonder, then, that during the 20th century the most important metaphysical questions have been posed by scientists, not by philosophers. Why is it that many of the most renowned scientists belonging to the century of quantum mechanics, of the DNA double helix, and of the Big Bang , have felt the need to face questions on the relationship between philosophy and science, between science and religion?
Many of those who opened new scientific horizons also wanted to offer a corresponding philosophical interpretation of their results. Even those contemporary scientists who have generally maintained a critical attitude towards the life of the spirit and towards transcendence, such as Monod, Weinberg or Hawking, have not been able to avoid facing problems which are relevant also from a humanistic, not only scientific, point of view.
Many others, whose names are too numerous to list here, have used their books of science popularization to convey reflections which go beyond the field of science to involve philosophical and even existential issues. If, on the one hand, such a state of affairs runs the risk of naive syntheses and often shows lack of theoretically mature proposals absent or rare among scientists, and uncertain among philosophers , on the other hand it tells us about the need to link, in a less instinctive and more convincing way, the knowledge coming from scientific, philosophical and religious thought.
The call to mutual listening cf.
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Haught, , and subsequently towards a meaningful dialogue between disciplines so different from one another seems to indicate the strong desire for a synthesis that would go beyond a simple symbiosis cf. The point is to see whether such a synthesis must rely on an exclusively subjective basis or, rather, whether there exists a common ground on which its research can be carried out.
And to ask whether is science the only universal objective language or, instead, a meaningful language capable of involving also our common existential experiences beyond the boundaries of each individual subject may exist, something the canons of scientific formal language and methods are unable to express and disclose by alone.
Many authors have provided presentations and evaluations of the various forms and projects of unity of knowledge throughout the history of thought. Here, my aim is to simply recall some of them within a short historical path. Philosophy has made several attempts to carry out a conceptual unification of reality, which represents a first step towards a possible unification of knowledge. In its rational dimension, reality was unified and reconstructed as if it were a single world of ideas and forms of divine origin.
This was done by following the principles of mathematics and geometry, which were thought to belong to the sphere of the divine rather than to the material world. Slowly, classical thought developed this perspective, creating the philosophy of the logos. According to the Platonic approach, the logos was something transcending nature, while Stoicism considered it as a law immanent in nature itself. Thus, objects and knowledge are structured according to a hierarchic model, whose final goal was to maintain the order, proportion, and coherence of the whole.
Firmly anchored to the doctrine of creation and providence, already known in the Old Testament, the writings of the New Testament, especially those of St. John, announced the revelation of a radical source of unification. It is the divine project of God-Father to create and sum up in Christ, his beloved Son, all things in heaven and on earth, and through Him, reconcile all things, making peace by the blood of the cross. Thus, the Christian Logos embraced the categories of creation and alliance, the transcendence of God over everything and His intimate presence in human history.
For the first time, the reasons of truth and the reasons of life, the demand of philosophical rationality and the hope of religious expectations were joined together. Aware of such philosophical richness, the Fathers of the Church developed a first example of a Christian unification process.
Unity of knowledge
The Greek apologists Theophilus of Antioch, Tatianus and Athenagoras, tried to persuade the pagans that the Provident God that they could come to know through nature, was the only God announced by the Christians. Emphasizing the uniqueness of one only God, good by nature, Augustine of Hippo overcame the split between good and evil maintained by Manichaeism, so depriving evil of any ontological basis. Christianity developed its first organic and structured project of unification of knowledge with the institution of the University in the Middle Ages.
There, the varieties of knowledge were organized around theology, because of the special role this discipline had for the final goal of the human being and the common good of society as a whole. For the most part, the Christian synthesis of that time was based on Sacred Scripture and on the Auctoritates. This last term was intended to indicate the Christian classics, as well as pagan philosophers such as Aristotele and Plato. The philosophy of the latter was transmitted through Augustine and Pseudo-Dyonisus.
Compared to theology, all the other disciplines played a subsidiary role, but it would be wrong to think that such a role was merely instrumental. The work of pagan philosophers, as well as the observation of natural phenomena available at that time, represented, in fact, a body of knowledge valued for its intrinsic importance.
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Authors of the Middle Ages used this knowledge to suggest key analogies between the book of nature and the book of Scriptures, to offer arguments to support the reasonableness of Christian beliefs, and to pose questions which prompted theology to elaborate new syntheses and more profound researches. In this epoch, Christianity applied a new reading of the concept of Nature in light of the concept of Creation. In this way, the hierarchical scale of beings discussed in ancient philosophy was restored and now presented under a theological point of view: In harmony with the properties of the Christian Logos, this proposal of unification did not concern only the theoretical, but also included the existential level.
It is also clear how the road to the light is opened and how all things, heard or known, hide God intimately. This is the result of all sciences, because in them faith must be built, God honored, rules established for better behavior, the union of bride and bridegroom satisfied through charity. The Sacred Scriptures lead to charity, and, consequently, all enlightenment comes from Above. Without it [charity] all knowledge is in vain, because we will never reach the Son without the Holy Spirit, who teaches us all Truth and is blessed throughout the centuries.
The disciplines other than theology did not undergo such a reductio as if they were limited by theology or dissolved into it.
Unity of science
The truth about something became clearer by leading it back Lat. The project of unification undertaken by Roger Bacon in his Opus Maius was, in this respect, quite interesting. This work is a kind of ante litteram Encyclopedia, describing all the various fields of knowledge and their different methodologies.
Bacon emphasizes the importance of bringing together, under the light of theology, all knowledge coming from the observation of nature. Observations should be made with a scientific mind, even with a sense of curiosity and of awe of the unknown. Because of this approach, the Franciscan was charged with occultism.
In addition to Vincent of Beauvais ca. It is interesting to observe that the University was the place where the elaboration of most of the above mentioned attempts towards unification were carried out. For its depth and clarity of thinking, the figure of Thomas Aquinas emerges in this academic context. His systematic approach was the result of the studies he ran at the scientific School of his master Albert the Great ca. His unwavering certainty of the uniqueness of truth, as well as his strong belief in the compatibility of the unique goodness and truth of God with all that good and true that was said by everyone in every epoch, made it possible for him to admit the Aristotelian corpus —among which there were not only philosophical titles, but also Meteorology, Astronomy, Biology, Physics— in the Commentaries and in the Quaestiones discussed at the university.
With courage and balance he recognized the accuracy and depth of the knowledge gathered by Aristotle. After so many centuries, it seems difficult to imagine the innovative, and in some way, revolutionary, undertaking of such a search for a synthesis between religious and secular knowledge, the importance of which can never be overestimated. This courageous cultural work could be repeated today, John Paul II has said, only if knowledge from the natural sciences becomes available to theologians and it is properly used in their work.
Yet these developments also offer to theology a potentially important resource. Just as Aristotelian philosophy, through the ministry of such great scholars as St Thomas Aquinas, ultimately came to shape some of the most profound expressions of theological doctrine, so can we not hope that the sciences of today, along with all forms of human knowing, may invigorate and inform those parts of the theological enterprise that bear on the relation of nature, humanity and God?
According to the Muslim philosopher Averroes , to whom the doctrine of the double truth is sometimes wrongly attributed, there is, instead, only one truth, that developed in the rigorous reasoning of philosophy. However, religious thought does not need to refer to such a truth because its way of talking about God, different from that of philosophy, need not rely on necessary causal relationships. According to Averroes, religion did not need any philosophical truths, given that its purpose was only to incite the feeling of the people having its source in the Koran.
The Latin Averroists welcomed Averroes, but above all they welcomed his Aristotelian Commentaries , trying to read them in a Christian context. In fact, the Latin Averroists admitted that philosophy might reach, through rational demonstrations, conclusions different from those offered by the Sacred Scriptures. It was precisely against this perspective that Thomas Aquinas strongly reacted. In all his works, he strongly endorsed the position that philosophical rationality, when correctly applied, was a way of reaching and knowing the truth.
For him, philosophy, including Aristotelian philosophy, could be used as a rational instrument of theological thought. Philosophical conclusions, when rightly formulated, could by no means lead to contradictions to faith because of the uniqueness of truth. In fact, to talk about God requires the richest possible language, and, at times, philosophical language is not sufficient. For this last reason, he entertained the idea that, differently form Aristotelians, when talking about the first Principle and about God Platonic philosophers did so in a way that was more consistent with Christian faith, because of the transcendent perspective they assumed.
On the contrary, they could not discuss the material entities in a satisfactory manner, because they placed the ultimate reasons of their knowledge and truth in abstract principles and separate ideas, in contrast to Aristotelians, whose language was more adequate to speak of material things see In de Divini nominibus expositio , Proemio, II.
In the Modern Age, the intellectual synthesis brought about by the Middle Ages appears no longer possible, for at least two reasons. The first is the on-going methodological diversification of all fields of research.
As a result, the dialogue between the various branches of knowledge becomes more difficult, eventually causing the beginning of a gradual hiatus between scientific and humanistic disciplines, between the sciences of Nature and the sciences of the Spirit.
The premises of this split were laid in the 17th century but its full development became evident towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Now, not only could the motion of the heavens be explained by the laws of mechanics Newton, Laplace , but even the study of the virtues of the government Machiavelli , the rules of social life Hobbes, Montesquieu, Shaftesbury , and the knowledge necessary for guiding the real progress of humankind Comte, Marx , could now be deduced from sources other than Christian biblical doctrine.
These matters had to be established autonomously, accepting for the first time the logic that the end was able to unconditionally justify the means. Although the philosophical movements of the Modern Age made use of concepts and categories of Christian origin, what now remained was nothing but its outer shell, its original meaning having been replaced by different contents cf.
Later on, human beings would lose even the possession of their own psyche Freud. Finally, the discovery of boundless space-time dimensions in which Homo sapiens must now interpret and read his biological, geological, and cosmic history would contribute to upsetting our previous orientation, thus confining human nature to a quite marginal role.
Nevertheless, in order to not overestimate the real import of these changes themselves, some further questions should be addressed as well: Was the human being, and not rather God, what the Patristic-Medieval synthesis between the religious and secular readings of nature put at the center of the world? Did this supposed anthropocentrism concern the human being as such or, rather, the humanity of the incarnated Logos, Jesus Christ? Did we lose the unity of knowledge when the various disciplines began to use their autonomous methodological procedures or, rather, when the knowing subject began to abandon holding together a culture of the aims and a culture of means , that is, breaking the harmonious relationship between the moral view which supplied the grounds of human behavior and the pragmatic view that now suggested the praxis to achieve the required goals?
Moreover, in order to better understand this split, we cannot ignore the role played by precise theories that introduced analogous radical separations, especially in Western thought: It is worth noting that in spite of the loss of the previous synthesis, the Modern Age did not renounce manifesting its own tendency towards unity. It also does so idealistically, by entrusting to the Spirit, to Reason, or to History the task of unveiling the role of the parts within the whole. Approaching our own times, a certain way of understanding techno-scientific knowledge inherits, at the beginning of the 20th century, such a philosophical process, particularly through Neo-Positivism, especially in its physicalist and more radical versions.
Although it has been criticized by scientific thought itself, which pointed out the intrinsic incompleteness and the inescapable outcome of skepticism brought about by this reductionistic program, neo-postivistic illusion still seems to survive within the scientism channeled by the media and unconsciously accepted by a large part of public opinion. From the beginning of the 17th century, the search for some unity of thought prompted the creation of comprehensive proposals: Because of World War II, and also, to a greater extent, because of the breakdown of the epistemological current of thought supporting it, of this last work they were able to publish only the first volume, in Among the projects started in Catholicism, it should be mentioned also the theoretical design of a unity of all the sciences as outlined in the impressive Theosophy written by Antonio Rosmini, and later developed in other works of his, which represents the most ambitious project of that epoch.
In the Modern Age were not always encyclopedias, but often smaller and very influential works, which suggested strong new lines of thought towards some unification of knowledge. In the socio-political field we find other important attempts at a unified interpretation of reality, as were the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, and the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Weber.
Contemporary times have been witness to the wide-range project put forward by hermeneutics. This philosophical current has certainly contributed to a better methodology of knowledge, by researching the criteria that should be employed when interpreting a written text. Currents of thought such as structuralism, behaviorism, the psychoanalytical movement or the philosophy of language, can be also considered a unifying reading of reality, of knowledge and of behavior.
Contrary to other methodological unifications mentioned above, these last do not seem to be interested in the unity of knowledge as such. In a certain sense, hermeneutics itself and the currents it originated are concerned with unification insofar as their investigation are aimed at the reconstructing the possible unity of a meaning. In so doing, the risk exists of ending by confining itself into a closed, endless circle, having no longer interest in the universality of truth, thus frustrating the effort to understand and interpret.
In the previous paragraphs I have purposely omitted talking about phenomenology and metaphysics just because, among many other methodological proposals, these two philosophical perspectives have the explicit task of keeping track of reality and of being regulated by what reality reveals, suggests or even imposes on the consideration of the subject. Both metaphysics and phenomenology represent a modality of linking together the knowledge reached by our senses, and that which transcends them, a capacity of going up and down in a circle, from effect to cause and from cause to effect, making possible their complementary and integrated application.
The University has been such a place. Newman The Idea of a University , In spite of their differences, they all agree on one basic idea: Concerning the need for a contextual and interdisciplinary research of truth, Karl Jaspers wrote the following: We strive to know particular data, not in and for themselves, but as the only way of getting at that oneness. Without reference to the whole of being science loses its meaning.
With it, on the other hand, even the most specialized branches of science are meaningful and alive. One is our will to know the infinite variety and multitude of reality which forever eludes us. The other is our actual experience of the unity underlying this plurality. Similar reflections had been suggested one century before by Newman: What indeed can it teach at all, if it does not teach something particular? It teaches all knowledge by teaching all branches of knowledge, and in no other way. I do but say that there will be this distinction as regards a Professor of Law, or of Medicine, or of Geology, or of Political Economy, in a University and out of it, that out of a University he is in danger of being absorbed and narrowed by his pursuit, and of giving Lectures which are the Lectures of nothing more than a lawyer, physician, geologist, or political economist; whereas in a University he will just know where he and his science stand, he has come to it, as it were, from a height, he has taken a survey of all knowledge, he is kept from extravagance by the very rivalry of other studies, he has gained from them a special illumination and openness of mind and freedom and self-possession, and he treats his own in consequence with a philosophy and a resource, which belong not to the study itself, but to his liberal education.
On the occasion of his speech to university professors in Turin, Italy, in , he said: To withdraw into oneself is to condemn oneself, sooner or later, to sterility and to risk exchanging the norm of total truth for a keener method of analysing and grasping a particular section of reality. In other words, universities must have, at the center of their reflection, the fundamental questions about Truth and Good, about the meaning of life, about the place of the human being in the universe, and about the personal and social responsibility that is associated with any knowledge.
Excluding these questions from the university would mean interrupting its ages-long tradition, thus enervating its nature and mission. This is of extreme importance today. Today, opposed to what happened in the Middle Ages, the field in which the great traditions of thought meet and confront each other is no longer the scientific arena of the universities cf. The debate has now moved away from the campus to the area of public opinion, to the logic that creates and controls the consensus, often driven by political, ideological or financial motivations.
Such a shift of arena brings about obvious dangers. There are, today, planetary problems that for their content and size involve the future of mankind. These problems, that concern economy, techno-science, ethics, and law, bring about conflicts and clashing of interests precisely because one place is lacking —the university— where knowledge, results, and procedures can be critically evaluated without any economic, social or political conditioning, that is, super partes , thanks to the maturity of a well-prepared education, able to apply the humanistic resources of science and to train technicians aware of the needs of a more human society.
Any reflection on the unity of knowledge should begin by considering the unity of theknownobject see above, II. In fact, any subject portrays, with many efforts and not without mistakes, what is found in the reality of things. The unity of knowledge speaks of, and whenever possible it describes and gives reasons for, the unity of objective reality. Only when the unity of the object is not overlooked, the activity of the knowing subject can be thought in a non-subjective way.
In this case, it also becomes possible to look at the truth expressed by the action phenomenology without neglecting the truth revealed by the being metaphysics. Contemporary science willingly speaks of the unification of the whole of physical reality, especially in the context of theoretical physics.
Historically speaking, theoretical unifying formalisms gravitational theory, electromagnetism, the unified fields theory, quantum electrodynamics, electro-weak unification, etc. It is also true that these results, that is, their objective counterpart, have rightly motivated the efforts to come. In terms of theoretical involvement and of economical resources as shown by the name Big Science , the costs of such an enterprise have quickly gone up every time a new step has been undertaken.
From a dynamic perspective, a strongly unifying picture has resulted from both contemporary cosmology and biology. The laws governing the structure and dynamics of the universe are able to link, in a consistent and harmonious way, microphysics and macrophysics. Also the development and diversification of living organisms, and of the biological processes driving their phenomenology, show a great underlying unity, going from the molecular level the structure of DNA to much more complex functions.
The presence of the human being, whose historical emergence would seem to interrupt, at least because of its uniqueness and self-awareness, this progressive and integrated phenomenology, in reality it reveals a new and greater level of unification. In fact, in order for mankind to exist, all the universe must also exist and must be one: However, the final step of conceiving of the whole of universe as a single object, strictly speaking, transcends the methods of empirical science.
There are properties that seem to be grasped and recognized only by abstracting from the parts and focusing on the whole. This regards both the structural aspects of physical or biological entities and, especially, their dynamics. The rediscovery and the successful application of analogy in science shows once more that we are facing a reality that includes some unifying criteria, while at the same time maintaining different levels of complexity. Researchers have become aware of the need for an open science, structured on levels that are organically connected by analogy, as the limits of reductionism and of a self-reliant knowledge have become more evident.
Thus, various disciplines are encouraged to work closely together. A more consistent study of what once they thought to be their own separate object, now requires the contribution of other fields of knowledge. One can be certainly tempted as frequently happens to expand the methodology proper to a specific field into another contiguous field of knowledge, but this clashes, sooner or later, with the impossibility of working in the new field having the same degree of decisional power and the same logical completeness one had within the original field of study.
Then, the need for new methodologies becomes more evident and new disciplines spring up, so emphasizing a re-evaluation of an interdisciplinary approach. And it happens that in an era of specialization and fragmentation of knowledge such as ours, a field of study which has the courage of opening itself to dialogue with other fields —thus accepting the challenge coming from other sources of knowledge— is surprisingly helped to better understand its own object. The first is that interdisciplinarity can be driven by a purely pragmatic functionalism. This happens when the request for an integration of different branches of knowledge only comes from a strong desire for a higher level of efficiency and production, not from the will to answer scientific, or even existential questions, having a particular foundational value.
In order to get to a deeper process of unifying knowledge, the interdisciplinary approach must have access to a philosophical consideration of nature philosophy of nature and of knowledge itself gnoseology. To achieve this, the interdisciplinary approach must evolve from a simple methodological strategy into a progressive opening up to different levels of the understanding of reality. In this way, the effort for performing more profound analyses no longer ends in mere de-composition, but opens up to the search for a foundation.
Philosophy of nature and metaphysics play an important role in any gnoseological itinerary as the one depicted above. Yet the truthfulness of these insights, formally impossible to prove, is based on an immediate knowledge of realistic kind, and on common sense in its philosophical meaning. On the other hand, representing a philosophy of being capable of going beyond sensory knowledge, metaphysics makes it possible to reach higher levels of comprehension and also of more general causation which give reason to what has been discovered and analyzed by each separate science.
Hence, metaphysics can be seen not only at the foundation of other disciplines but also as the higher level of knowledge to which they all tend. The well-known Cartesian image, which presents metaphysics as the roots of a tree whose trunk is represented by physics and mathematics and whose fruit is represented by more elaborate sciences, appears to be incomplete and somewhat misleading.
Of knowledge, metaphysics concerns the roots as well as the fruits. Getting to know these objectives from high above grants unity to the knowledge of the entire tree because the goal is to unveil more general causes, including the possibility of ascending to the existence of one first Cause. Other visions compatible with the one I have illustrated can be found in a number of authors who have maintained a close dialogue with the natural sciences.
It is worth mentioning the synthesis proposed, in our own time, by J. Maritain and by M. This approach also manages to explain, as shown in an extremely important study titled Distinguish to unite. The degrees of knowledge , how a learned and a mystical knowledge would observe at the same natural objects analyzed by sensible, scientific knowledge. Polanyi has suggested a hierarchic theory of knowledge consisting in various levels of a progressive understanding of reality.
The levels of logical comprehension coordinating the various sciences correspond to the way in which nature is structured following a given ontological hierarchy. Here, the highest and widest levels cannot be reduced to the inferior levels, nor fully described employing the terminology proper to these latter cf.
Personal Knowledge , , in particular part IV.
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The intelligibility of reality is structured in the same manner: Torrance to include theology also cf. Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge , Among the most recent philosophical reflections on interdisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity we find the contribution of E. Coming from the field of the sociology and philosophy of mass communication, the French thinker has tried to determine which methodology to adopt in order to better study the problem of complexity.
Starting from the material world, in which complexity is seen as a constant and, in part, also the most fundamental, modality, with which nature offers itself to our study cf. The follower of a philosophy deriving its categories from the behavior of nature and of a science increasingly aware of the interaction between subject-object, Morin has emphasized the need to elaborate a way of thinking that goes beyond the dualistic dialectic approach of Western thought. His approach intends to include the idea of a unitary logic, according to which human thought would be part of a habitat made of more than just an intellectual dimension, being our thought also influenced by biology, geology and ecology.
Morin has made long strides towards a methodological innovation aimed at unifying the sciences, as shown by the Charter of Transdisciplinarity , whose articles Morin signed together with Lima de Freitas and Basarab Nicolescu cf. However, his methodological intention seems to be confined to the field of a purely cognitive strategy and to be exclusively concerned with the identification of the ever-changing and adaptive laws of the ecosystem —including consciousness— thus betraying his lack of interest in a philosophy capable of giving some transcendent foundation to science and to human conscience.
New attempts for a unity of knowledge to be built on an interdisciplinary-dialogic approach have been developed by several English-language authors interested in the topic of the science-theology dialogue. Russell , rather than real unification proposals. Ellis have suggested a project of unity of knowledge on hierarchic levels.
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