I much appreciate Fred Nickols improvements on my comments on Peter
Drucker.
On the matter whether Drucker has been writing about "knowledge" for 40 or
50 years, I stand pat. While Landmarks of Tomorrow was indeed first
published in 1957, Drucker himself said recently that he has been writing
about the matter for 50 years, suggesting that Landmarks was not his first
statement on the matter.
The matter of the Cartesian world view and Drucker is more substantial,
and since Fred's correction of my statement might lead one to believe that
Drucker endorses or once endorsed the repudiation of Descartes and the
Englightenment a la current critiques, and that he favored what I called
"shiny new" paradigms.
Here is what Drucker says in part in the chapter cited by Fred:
"Fortunately we can already foresee..what form the new integration will
take.
"We can see at first what it will not be. It will go beyond and encompass
the Cartesian world-view rather than repudiate it. Thegreat shift to the
Cartesian world-view became necesary because its predecessor,
scholasticism, had become sterile had ultimately failed. The new
world-view, however, has become necessary largely because of the great
succes of its predecessor, the mechnistic, positivist Cartesian
'Science"."
In any event, Drucker abandoned this version of the "new paradigm" for all
practical purposes after Landmarkes: I cannot recall his using it again,
but perhaps Fred can find further uses of it.
Now,40 years after Drucker used and then abandoned this hackneyed
perspective, it is being exhumed and used by man who fail to appreciate,
as Drucker did, the genius of Descartes, and Newton, and the
Enlightenment, and all those on whose shoulders modern civilization
stands.
Steve Eskow
--"Dr. Steve Eskow" <dreskow@magicnet.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>