Positivism asserted that allcultures move through progressive stages of development: first the-ological, then metaphysical, and finally “positive.”
Is positivism the source of some of the "progress of human civilization" which David Graeber and David Wengrow point out as problematic in The Dawn of Everything?
Were their prior philosophical movements which may have fed into this forward moving impression? Great chain of being also plays into some of this from a hierarchical perspective.
Humboldt represents the road not taken. He was a scientist who saw everything as interconnected. He called for good global stewardship and objected to the careless exploitation of resources. His warnings weren’t heeded.
Given Alexander von Humboldt's time period (1769-1859), might he have been the recipient of indigenous knowledge during the Renaissance the same way that Graeber/Wengrow demonstrate others were around that same time frame?
This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal educa-tion must have been largely responsible for the emergence ofdemocracy as an ideal.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.
Graeber, David & Wengrow, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, McClelland & Stewart, 2021.
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Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.
Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?
What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?
social evolution
How did we get here?
Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.
It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.
Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there.
Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.