Worldview studies

Brave New Worldview

We settled on the title ‘‘The Age of Uncertainty’’ for the series. It sounded well; it did not confine thought; and it suggested the basic theme: we would contrast the great certainties in economic thought in the last century with the great uncertainty with which problems are faced in our time. In the last century capitalists were certain of the success of capitalism, socialists of socialism, i...

The Worldview of Phenomenology

Raymond College was an unusual experiment in American higher education, one that unfortunately was not to endure. I learned of the school thanks to the interest that Robert Maynard Hutchins took in my education. He was then the head of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. Hutchins admired the poetry of my mother, American poet Elizabeth Bartlett; it was she who ...

Culture, Worldview and Contextualization

What is a worldview?

The first part of this paper proposes a precise definition of what a worldview is, and why there is a necessity to have one. The second part suggests how to construct integrated scientific worldviews. For this attempts, three general scientific approaches are proposed: the general systems theory as the endeavor for a universal language for science, a general problem-solving approach and the ide...

Metaphilosophical Criteria for Worldview Comparison

Philosophy lacks criteria to evaluate its philosophical theories. To fill this gap, we introduce nine criteria to compare worldviews, classified in three broad categories: objective criteria (objective consistency, scientificity, scope) subjective criteria (subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality) and intersubjective criteria (intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narr...