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Marwa's picture

Week 1

The article for this week was really interesting and posed some intriguing questions. I think it has made me rethink the idea of inquiry and I can see how “inquiry is as much about conceiving new possibilities as it is about discovering what is” and that “[reality] is changing all the time, in part because of our own activities as inquirers.” For example, up until the 17th century, it was thought that the Earth was stationary at the center of the Universe, but now we know that the planets move around the stationary Sun. “Reality” changed as our inquiries changed.


What also interested me was one of the points mentioned as a general foundational idea that permeated the environment back in the 1960's and 70's – that complex phenomena would follow necessarily from isolating and fully characterizing simpler phenomena that gave rise to them. While this seems to work in the case of human body or a college or even a car, it makes me wonder about something like war – can we isolate and find reasons that cause a war? Do the reasons always make sense? Can we always understand complex phenomena this way?

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