Caminhos do conhecimento: reflexões sobre o pensamento complexo, a temporalidade e uma experiência budista

Abstract

The main purpose of this thesis is to invite to a reflection on anthropology in light of the major paradigm shifts that have taken place in the hard-science core. I begin by relating the establishment of social sciences as from the Illuminist context, which imprinted their main characteristics concerning reality model, methodology and principles. I subsequently clarify the most important news brought in by the complex thought in both social sciences and biology, physics and chemistry in order to introduce the major concepts we work with: the order/disorder/organization/interaction tetralogical ring; the culture/nature dialogism, the individual/species/society trinitary ring, and complex time through dissipative structures. To end the first part I present the Buddhist thought as a bridge between science and tradition. The second chapter brings some considerations regarding linear and simplifying temporality, which raised three ideas that anthropology must reassess: the existence of a flat path through which one goes from the simpler to the most complex thinking; the mutual exclusion of the terms 'continuity' and 'rupture', and the vision that history establishes human universality. To support same, I studied archaic Greece's poems, evaluated some aspects of their myth and time and discussed the role of history in social science. In the third and last part I resume the rediscovery of Prigogine's time and relate it to determinism, freedom and ethics. When complexified, ethics leads to the resumption of anthropology's need for change, so that it truly becomes 'the science of man'