Luca Valera
Institute of Philosophy of Scientific and Technological Action (FAST) Campus-Biomedical University of Rome, Rome, I
Keywords:
Ecology , History of Ecology , Human Ecology , Ecosystems
Abstract
Ecology (from the Greek words οi[κος, “house” and λογία, “study of”) is the science of the “house”, since it studies the environments where we live. There are three main ways of thinking about Ecology: Ecology as the study of interactions (between humans and the environment, between humans and living beings, between all living beings, etc.), Ecology as the statistical study of interactions, Ecology as a faith, or rather as a science that requires a metaphysical view. The history of Ecology shows us how this view was released by the label of “folk sense” to gain the epistemological status of science, a science that strives to be interdisciplinary. So, the aim of Ecology is to study, through a scientific methodology, the whole natural world, answering to very different questions, that arise from several fields (Economics, Biology, Sociology, Philosophy, etc.). The plurality of issues that Ecology has to face led, during the Twentiethcentury, to branch off in several different “ecologies”. As a result, each one of these new approaches chose as its own field a more limited and specific portion of reality.
