Disclosing New Worlds

rdf:langString Disclosing New Worlds

rdf:langString Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (1997) is a book co-authored by Fernando Flores, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa (a consultant philosopher specializing in commercial innovation). It is a philosophical proposal intended to restore or energize democracy by social constructionism via an argument style of world disclosure but which philosophy is distinct from: * Relativism, a concept in which points of view have no absolute truth or validity * Formalism, an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy * Essentialism, the view that, for any specific entity (such as an animal, a group of people, a physical object, a concept), there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function. Nevertheless, the authors build on these ideas and seek to reformulate the relationship between democratic rights and economic progress when persistent technological advance obscures an uncertain future for humanity threatened by multiple issues such as peak oil, global warming and environmental degradation. The authors concentrate on three practical activities: * Social entrepreneurship * Active citizenship * Social solidarity. The authors reason that human beings are at their best when engaged in imaginative and practical innovation rather than in abstract reflection, and thus challenging accepted wisdom and conventional practices within their particular environment, or as the authors claim, when they are making history. History-making, in this account, refers not to political power changes, wars or violent revolution, but to changes in the way people understand their personal qualities and deal with their particular situations.