Western Culture, the Fragmentation of Knowledge and the Global Approach

Abstract

The complexity, the intensity and the dimensions, frequently global, of the problems typical of our era - from those concerning the human mind and health to those of the climate and the environment - call for a transdisciplinary, or at least interdisciplinary systems approach. Sometimes they suggest the use of holistic conceptions, at least in the sense of a comprehensive view of a unified physical or spiritual entity that transcends the mechanistic approach, which simply sums up its constituent aspects, events, phenomena and elements, and does not take sufficient account of their irreversibility, hence of the need to assess their long-term effects.