From strange minutiae to concrete living
From strange minutiae to concrete living

Summary/Abstract: John Archibald Wheeler always pushed into the future, re-visiting past ideas in an attempt to clarify what troubled him in the present. He offered many of his ideas through down-to-earth stories, two of which are adapted to the present inquiry. A striking case of Wheeler’s two tales is presented in the 2009 swine flu buildup in Mexico and its consequences. Qualification of such concrete illustrations calls for a few words regarding what Peirce termed ‘objective idealism’, a philosophical posture further exemplified in that make-shift ideal in the history of science, ‘phlogiston’, which was later replaced by ‘oxygen’. These examples serve further to qualify interdependent, interactive interrelatedness through complementary coalescence, and to elucidate the process illustrated in Figure 6.

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