The Anthropocentric Revolution and Our Common Future

Abstract

A philosopher among scientists — it can be a lonely business, at least as long as philosophy is identified with profundity and science with crude positivism. But things have not looked like that for a long time. Philosophy has accommodated itself to a world which owes ever more to the work of the scientific and technical imagination. And science has learned that reality, even that reality in which scientists work and live, is not confined to what is scientifically the case. Our problems, one might say, do not do us the favour of defining themselves as either philosophical or scientific. And scientific problems connect with philosophical problems all the more as the world becomes increasingly a product of Man, and as this world begins to appropriate Man to itself, as for instance in biotechnology and reproductive medicine.