Jude - Thanks for sharing this perspective. I'd really like to see your
paper and not just the cite to the $80 edited volume in which it appears.
I've been puzzling over the different ways in which we might share scholarly
work among peers without violating copyright. We can share preprints and
open access copies of course, if we have them. We can also share edited
personal versions that are meant for community review, with the explicit
caution of something like "working version do not cite." We need a standard
for this practice that publishers will accede to.

I'd imagine not many other papers in that volume relate to the questions of
designing with nature, for nature, or "using nature." While design studies
often cite philosophy, we rarely cite religious perspective and values.
Perhaps Taoism is safe because it is so ancient and uncontroversial as a
religious worldview.

I find it interesting that we can discuss transcendental philosophies (or
theology) as if these perspectives have an historical story that we might
reveal as influencing designing and design philosophy. Now Francois actually
prompts us to the next step - what perspectives do believers or students of
religions bring to design, use of nature, and material culture?  We have no
problem with historical treatments of theology.  But how do we - as
interdisciplinary scholars of design, philosophy, and ideas - treat
religious or contemplative practice as a legitimate influence and
perspective on design scholarship? Would we treat a serious thesis proposal
on inclusive or activist design from a religious viewpoints? What if instead
of citing Ivan Illich a student developed a design activist thesis around
the Catholic social values of dignity, subsidiarity and solidarity? Or even
the more radical notions of redemption and social justice in some faiths?  

I'm a Tao reader / practitioner but not a scholar in the field. But my
understanding of the Tao as a theological belief system is that it was very
influential to other beliefs but was never practiced as a religion in the
way we think of observance today. Didn't the stream of Tao thinking verge
into Confucian social and religious lifestreams one the one hand, and then
merge with Bodhidharma's Buddhism with the Zen influence on the other
diverging stream?  So perhaps Taoist perspectives are safe because they are
now historical and not part of an actively organized faith - not to mention
the central placement of nature in a transcendental way.

I'd like to see some further exploration of these ideas in a realized
context, as part of a larger conversation into the fashions of inquiry and
value systems acceptable in the design academy.

Peter Jones, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor, Faculty of Design
Sr. Fellow, Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab)

OCAD University
http://designdialogues.com





-----Original Message-----
From: CHUA Soo Meng Jude (PLS) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2012 10:08 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Galileo and the Church -- a Footnote

Dear Francois
Many thanks this is a good question and now I'm myself curious.
I'm not familiar with the Arabs, but I'd venture a guess re the Chinese.
This will need to be checked, but for the Chinese within Daoism there was
always the (religious) belief that nature had a certain order that led to
various forms of beneficial flourishings especially when not interefered
with. They credited all this to the Dao, some creative power behind the
scene that was invisible and unknowable. Some scholars argue that the
Chinese therefore saw in this a basis for inferring similar ways to act and
to behave. The suppressed premise here must be therefore the belief that the
Dao is some kind of model for behavior or action; unless we think so we
would not bother reading off nature various strategies like wuwei
(non-action) for action. So this may be the interpretant we are looking for,
but this seems to me a very unstable premise, unlike in the Christian
theological framework where God is not only the creative agent but a morally
responsible one who is consistent, etc. Also  I'd be hesitant to say that
this afforded them the confidence to study nature with a view to discovering
speculatively the truth about nature, (in comparison with say an
Aristotelian, who might wish to know nature as it is in itself). One reading
is to see the Dao as a model to imitate and therefore indicating general
practical strategies when dealing with the world : precisely by not
over-engaging it.  Hence the talk of wu wei. You'd notice that we can
develop general heuristics to guide behavior even if we cannot with
certainty know what exactly the world is like.  You can see I'm rambling and
do no justice to your question or the topic.  This is a good research to
embark on.  Maybe something worth working on. Now I'm interested.  The other
thing is that there are complications in deciphering how the Chinese
commentators really read the Dao de Jing text.  My own study of WangBi
suggests that his reading of the Dao de Jing basically stuffed his own
social scientific insights into the text by exploiting the fact that chinese
phrases have more than one possible meaning.  So for one commentator at
least, he was not at all studying nature or the Dao and informing his
practice.  He was simply developing some pragmatic observations about human
behavior and using the ancient text as a mouthpiece for his own ideas.  And
perhaps one could say that even if one can predict human behavior, one need
not know the truth of things in themselves.  My paper appears here:
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4990-philosophy-and-religion-in-earl.aspx.  So
the interpretant you are looking may not be easy to locate. I mean the
Chinese typically have "models" of processes of nature, but their account of
nature (both physics and metaphysics) in itself is almost naive and
imagined. 

Jude
________________________________________
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Francois Nsenga
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2012 12:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Galileo and the Church -- a Footnote

Dear Jude

Just as a curious layman.

You close your footnote saying

"...without this theological interpretant, one would not even have the
confidence to embark on the potentially pointless and futile study of
physis." This is an interpretation in the christian perspective.

In comparison, would you by any chance know which was the arabic and chinese
'interpretant' (s) that gave impetus and 'confidence'  within those two
other intellectual poles to study nature?

Thanks in advance

Francois
Montréal
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg

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