Brad McCormick corrected me correctly - my apologies for memory
infallibility. On looking up my resource for that statement, I find that I
should have named Descartes rather than Rousseau.
Quote from The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra (Page 19)
Rene Descartes created the method of analytic thinking, which consists in
breaking up complex phenomena into pieces to understand the behavior of the
whole from the properties of its parts. Descartes based his view of nature
on the fundamental division between two independent and separate realms -
that of mind and that of matter. The material universe, including living
organisms was a machine for Descartes, which could in principle be
understood completely by analyzing it in terms of its smallest parts.
The conceptual framework created by Galileo and Descartes - the world as a
perfect machine governed by exact mathematical laws - was completed
triumphantly by Isaac Newton, whose grand synthesis, Newtonian mechanics,
was the crowning achievement of seventeenth-century science.
The point I was trying to make, was that much of what we consider knowledge,
statistics, mathematical proof came from a view of the universe which is
under serious challenge by systems thinking. If this challenge is valid,
many of the truths we are so sure give us the "right" answer may be found to
be based on a false model.
