S
Sciborg_S_Patel
Blackfoot Physics and European Minds
Western science and "European consciousness" is contrasted with that of Indigenous and traditional peoples. The metaphysics of the Blackfoot of North America, and their vision of an animate world, is examined. The essay argues that a similar world view existed in Europe up to the early middle ages but that the secularization of space, time and matter paved the way for the development of "Western science" and its associated technologies and notions of progress, prediction and control. The essay speculates that a new science may be possible which combines the current power of abstraction and analysis with an "impersonal subjectivity".
Future, Vol 29, 563-573, 1997