About Consilience Blog

About Consilience: The Blog

The consilience blog has three main aims to achieve sustainable development. 1) To disseminate relevant information between academics, professionals, and all interested parties. 2) Coordinating a cohesion of processes that allow sustainable development to take place. 3) Establishing a standard forum whereby ideas can be exchanged by the consilient community.

Where it all begins: The history of Consilience from its start to the present day.

The absolute start of consilience is very clear and defined. In his 1840 book, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, the British scientist William Whewell created a new idea that encompassed much of his knowledge in the areas of mathematics, theology, philosophy, and science.

When Whewell published this book, the atmosphere of the scientific community was tending towards specialization into detailed areas of study. Apart from his peers, Whewell was more of a Renaissance man, with a broader scope of knowledge over many different areas. He had published books and articles in a number of disciplines, including mathematics, geology, architecture, religion, poetry, and even simple translations between languages. He is credited with being the first to use the words of scientist and physicist. While some debate whether he was actually the first to coin these terms, there is no doubt that his was the first appearance of the word consilience. His use of consilience was related to the idea that an induction that comes from one set of facts also has a place with a different set of facts. In this manner, the consilience becomes a test if the induction is correct or not.

Many great thinkers have been labelled as Renaissance men, with Leonardo Da Vinci being the most famous. The common thread that links these men is their study into various disciplines and their inductions based from a wide variety of subjects. Charles Darwin is also considered to be a Renaissance man and his treatise on the evolution and origin of species is built from an understanding not only of animals, but also geology, morphology, and embryology.

Despite Whewells fame as a celebrated thinker of his times, the term of consilience disappeared into obscurity until the turn of the century when it was brought back to light by E. O. Wilson, another Renaissance man that had a great deal of knowledge over all of the natural sciences. He published a book titled Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge that effectively revived the term of consilience.

Based on his thoughts, the idea of Wilson’s book was that consilience could be used to rectify the gap that exists between science and the arts. This is done using reductionism to break down the complicated concepts of each discipline into understandable parts, similar to the theory of synecdoche in literature. In this manner, the individual parts can be examined to provide a more thorough understanding of the whole. This does not mean that it is a unification of all fields of study, but rather that the method of consilience can be used in many different situations.

In time, the definition of consilience has morphed into other forms. Few definitions take Wilson’s idea of reductionism into account and simply state the word as meaning the unification of all fields of knowledge.

For Consilience: The Blog, the authors have decided to use Wilson’s theory of reductionism as one of the main inspiration points and as a utility for bringing about the true convergence of knowledge.

The blog also intends to use the idea of consilience in reference to sustainable development, encompassing all of the relevant disciplines that are needed for the development. By creating a space where the area of professional expertise and academic knowledge overlap, there can be meaningful discourse about consilience and how it relates to better understanding of the sustainable development.

There are two different areas where Consilience: The Blog will focus attention. The first is the large scale discourse between man and his environment. This includes the role that industry plays and the way that it affects human and environmental development. The more detailed field of study for the blog will be where specialized professionals and academics can discuss the optimal solutions for sustainable development, such as architectural plans, accounting procedures, and legal concerns. These dual areas of focus will ensure that the participants can have a clear view of both the bigger picture and the smaller details that are needed to make up the bigger picture.