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ing and exhilarating. It is no exaggeration to say that science, as such, is acquiring a uniform global shape, and that nature, as such, is finally coming into definitive view. Academic censors in the U.S. would merely lend workers in Europe and Asia a competitive edge; and if suppressed at home, stem cell research, evolutionary biology, environmental science, and climate studies would merely keep soaring elsewhere. The progress of reason is unstoppable.
The marvelous fact of twenty-first century science is its interdisciplinary convergence. Physics has made strides in unifying quantum theory, general relativity, and thermodynamics, thereby strengthening its ties to chemistry, and in turning cosmology from a hope into a science. Chemistry has shown the unification of entropic and evolutionary traits of material organization, thereby harmonizing itself with biology, and in revolutionizing our understanding of material grids. Climate studies marry chaos- and complexity theory to meteorology and paleontology, and chart the musical beats of the biosphere. It appears we are at the cusp of a unified model of reality.
The results will be revolutionary, to say the least. For the first time in human civilization, we can now pursue questions of origin and design in a rigorous, rational, and empirical form. While older intellectual workers scoffed at questions about the creation of matter, mind, or nature, younger researchers enjoy the luxury of being able to investigate these questions systematically. The Great Integration of Information, it appears, is globally just around the corner.
As such developments are ever more visible in worldwide publications they also give us a new philosophical assignment. The rift between analytic rigor and postmodern deconstruction can be healed in a critical return to our older wisdom. Scientists, from S. Hawking in Physics to E. O. Wilson in Biology, ask philosophers to join them in the quest for nature's pattern and point. And both Hawking and Wilson remind us that Philosophy's heyday was the Age of Enlightenment, while the developments after Kant, in their view, had been somewhat of a comedown.
The new Philosophy assignment is thus a rather old one, dating from three centuries ago. Thinkers need to return to this early modern task, to work on the systematic frames of meaning. The path of discovery runs between the extremes of dumb dogmatism and shallow skepticism. The critical key for doing this work is to remember that Western Enlightenment resulted from the first era of globalization-had it not been for the secular influence of China's culture on the European lands ravaged by the Christian terror of the Thirty Years War, the pioneers of the Enlightenment, such as Leibniz, Wolff, Voltaire, and Kant, would have been all but impossible.
There are multiple ways of returning to this assignment, and give-and-take pluralism is indeed the point. But two items merit anyone's consideration, especially in schools at the Gulf. First, Philosophy can rise to the occasion if it is humble enough to look outside, to the data of other disciplines, and to integrate this empirical rainbow into rational frames. Second, we can frame the data by focusing on the deeper meaning of climate change that escapes America's politicians. To avoid more Katrinas and Darwin Awards in this willfully ignorant society, philosophers must once again teach, just like shamans and metaphysicians had done earlier, to think like clouds-to map out viable stances in nature's dance. It's time to do work. There will be bad weather, and the clock's ticking. History will tell if neocons - too greedy, selfish, and mean - can wise up.
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