ABSTRACT
It seems to me that the negative effects of a collective representa-tion of life totally inadequate to account for the complexity of real-ity are for everybody to see. Fifty years on, my teacher’s words still feel extraordinarily relevant and contemporary. With their nineteenth-century approach, the sciences appear completely helpless in facing the issues of a society in which technological development, because of the very effects of its triumph, is now called to deal with the dramatic issue of our survival, threatened by far from reassuring near-future scenarios.
