From Bridget Carroll, Liverpool, UK
I was fascinated by your recent article on the essence of reality (4 February, p 29). I am trying to understand the origins of behavioural difficulties in young children, and I see a connection.
Alfred North Whitehead, who co-wrote Principia Mathematica with fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell, eschewed any material reality. In 1929, he wrote: “There persists… the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material… senseless, valueless, purposeless… It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism’… which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuitable to the scientific situation.” He held that reality is a dynamic process.
In the 17th century, philosopher Gottfried Leibniz similarly believed that reality is “activity”.
Current systems theorists do not assume a bedrock material of “reality”. Measurement is an intrusion and represents a temporary state – in which not everything can be measured.
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I find “” fascinating. For me it has required a complete suspension of traditional ways of thinking, and offered relief from the idea that behaviour has discrete, static , which leads to the blaming of children and families.
Is it time for a major rethink of the nature of “reality”?
