Externality and materiality as themes in the history of the human sciences

Extracted 12SEP2011 from http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1984-029220080001...

[A philosophical view of concepts that correspond, only at a very deep level, to concepts by the same name in Economics and Finance. This transdisciplinary connection is offered to stimulate deeper reflection on a firm's strategic assumptions about span of control and the meaning that is made of its experience and operations in unfamiliar or ambiguous situations.]

This article presents and discusses some attempts to overcome the "Cartesian" dualism of "mind versus matter" and "interior versus exterior", in particular the attempts of anthropologist Tim Ingold in his book "The Perception of the Environment" (2000). Central to Ingold's argument is a shift in focus from structure to process (temporality), from design to growth, from the organism in a context to organism and environment as co-evolutionary and co-constitutive entities. Ingold builds on ecological thinking (Bateson and Gibson) and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger). This article characterises Ingold's position as a neo-romantic reaction to the "linguistic turn" in the human sciences and the "genetic turn" in biology and compares his position to historical romanticism.