Friday, January 8
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Development as a term has won out over its competitors:
•
“civilization”, “westernization”, “modernization” even “liberation”.
Principles of Biological Development:
-
Directionality
: you know where a seed and seedling are headed.
-
Cumulative:
Each stage of growth is necessary for the organism to be able to pass on to the
next, “higher” stage.
-
Continuity:
A seedling is the same organism as a tree, a caterpillar is the same organism as a
moth
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Irreversibility:
It is impossible to go back.
•
Problems with applying this metaphor to human society:
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Who says that villages are destined to become cities?
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Civilizations collapse.
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For some groups of people, things used to be better.
Aristotle
(382-322), an early expositor of the natural metaphor:
-
The Greek word
physis
can be translated as both ‘nature’ and ‘development’
-
Every being has a physis: its own principle of development
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“The nature of a thing is its end. For what each thing is when fully developed we call its
nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse or a family.” (Politica 1253)
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An individual cannot exist without the state, the state must have existed before the individual.
•
Science is the examination of things according to their nature (development)
. The nature of
humans is to be found in the state.
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- Spring '10
- AlbertoSanchez
- Sociocultural evolution, Centuries
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