Towards Pragmatist Thermodynamics: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Entropy and Sustainability
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath · 2025
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Description
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, a solo author, argues for a new way to think about heat, disorder, and sustainability, in a 2025 essay. The science of heat in balance, classical thermodynamics, sits inside daily engineering. Its out-of-balance branch feels remote, and its key term, entropy, stays a mystery to most people, which weakens how societies plan for sustainability.
The essay builds a framework it calls lived thermodynamics, rooted in the pragmatist thought of Charles Peirce. It swaps the classic lone system for tangles of open systems whose disorder-making is often bent by evolution and chance. Drawing on older work about power and growth in living things, it offers a sustainability test based on entropy. The aim is to bring the science of heat closer to lived choices.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Carsten Herrmann-Pillath |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 81 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |