Epistemological Grounds to Transcend the Habitability Crisis

The Earth's habitability crisis must be confronted with an appropriate epistemological paradigm, otherwise this crisis cannot be overcome. This chapter analyzes the major epistemological failures of the social and natural sciences in addressing the habitability crisis. Many of the current approaches to the crisis fail to understand it comprehensively because they adopt a dualistic view of the relationship between nature and society and are based on positivism and idealism. It is argued that a unifying monist perspective based on materialism and dialectics shows the link between nature and society in terms of causality and necessity and reveals the intervening mediations. Only such an epistemological approach can provide a truly scientific understanding of the relationship between nature and society, and thus opens up the possibility of overcoming the crisis.