Historic "Heroes" of World Systems Theory

Regarding my latest posting to WSN, I wanted to make the following clarifications and points:

 

1.  I’d just assume let the Hegel side discussion go by the wayside.  However, just so we’re all clear on this:  while I’m not the biggest fan of Hegel, he along with Kant (and many of the others I mentioned as being notable thinkers of the post-1500 modern period and among “my favorites”) are very important; make no mistake about it.  These thinkers as well as others I mentioned (and still others didn’t mention in that posting) will be judged to be high on the “best of world history” some centuries down the road, alongside the likes of Aristotle, Confucius, et al.  Does an examination of “heroes in history” have its point?  Of course it does.  For whether we’re talking about a Cheng Ho explorer as hero or an Albert Einstein intellectual as hero, the fact that these heroes are symbols for their times and the historical dynamics which took place in their times are represented as well by way of them, the “heroes” are the vehicles by which we come to understand historical periods & the themes/patterns contained within them.  But when we talk about historic intellectuals as “heroes” there’s an added dimension to the discussion.  These “heroes” (unlike a Napoleon or a Julius Caesar or a Genghis Kahn) also represent particular schools of intellectual thought (which plays off many other schools of philosophy/science/etc. in human events) and these are consistently at play against each other in the ongoing story of world [intellectual] history.

 

This is why, I referred to “Evolution, Big History, and the Pro-Con Dialectical Maps Inherent Within” in the title of my post.  There are these pro-con dialectical maps within historical evolution & world history.  The intellectual ‘greats’ or hero thinkers who occupy historic intellectual schools (which are played off each other in evolutionary world history or big history) aren’t just “great persons in history”; they are the means by which these maps are organized and by which world [intellectual] history in general world history operates.

 

2.  The point of the whole evolution passage I wrote was to provide an example of how such pro-con dialectical maps work in a more concrete way as to the ongoing, yet intermittent philosophical debates within a generation and over generational contexts.  But the first important statement to make here is that such debates are never between just an “us” and a “them.”  There are never just two sides in the debate; there are many sides – hence in the evolution debate, there are Darwinists, Non-Darwinian evolutionists, Biblical Creationists, theistic evolutionists, ID theorists, and many more.  My second point was to show that many of the “for” and “against” arguments of the various sides in the evolution can be expressed by way of different knowledge maps.  One of the logical knowledge maps to use in terms of the ID theorists’ arguments is from Catholic theology-philosophy (as I outlined in my last post).  Why make reference to this map?  Only because ID theory’s basic premises and assumptions are drawn from the religious notion that the fingerprints of God can be found in physical reality, that by tracing back the causative lines of physical things in a scientific manner a person can eventually find proof of divine, spiritual agency behind material things in our cosmos.  But if the classic theology I mentioned is to be taken seriously, it may not prove so simple to find such spiritual “fingerprints.”  Even apart from the points of the teleo-mechanists, classic Christian theological scholarship itself demonstrates a problem in positing a smooth connection between spiritual agency and its effects on the physical world (as my other post sufficiently showed) …

 

3.  The last part was meant merely to show you some material that I thought you might like to know about.  You may in fact not be interested in any of the URL citations I have; still from my experience its always good to know about some of these things whether or not we agree with such sources or find them directly useful to our work.  I happen to think Maritain’s book (On the Philosophy of History) for example is worth sufficient attention paid by us.  However – as with any of the URL’s I occasionally point out in my WSN messages [and with those I mentioned in my last one] – I can only leave it to your own judgment as to its benefit or lack of such.  I think it’s good stuff; but all I can really do is to showcase what I think is good and then let you all decide, because I highly value your inputs regarding my own likes and dislikes.

 

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What does this matter have to do with World Systems Theory?  Let me rephrase the question as this:  who – in terms of general historical figures or intellectuals (be they philosophers, scientists, literary scholars, et al) are the “heroes” of World Systems Theory?  This, in essence, is the determinative purpose/query behind this post and the last one.  And, then, once that question has been considered, my next question would be:  what are the most important intellectual schools in world [intellectual] history according to world systems theorists?  I’ve phrased my question in terms of individual “heroes”; but if great persons are less significant in world systems history, what types of people are the heroes of World Systems Analysis?

 

I look forward to your insights.  Best!

 

Luke R.

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