This text is aimed at outlining the meaning that the relationship between society and scientific knowledge has taken under the context of capitalism. Capitalist development and modern science advanced from a relationship of interdependence between mercantile logic of the former and the linear assumptions of the latter. Therefore, several unwanted consequences produced by the system in the last centuries can be credited to Cartesian rationalism. In the meanwhile, in face of unfulfilled promises of capitalism in its cognitive version, modern science starts to be challenged in its most basic fundament: man's domination over nature. Nonlinear perspectives emerge or re-emerge from its criticism, which seek to consider new connections and/or knowledges between consciousness and existence, between subject and object, between man and nature, between society and knowledge. Our expectation is that such debate, marked by antagonism and tensions, more transparent as it is more impertinent, can contribute to a dialogue that ends in knowledge that is less obtuse for attending to reality's complexity. A new knowledge able to humbly reconcile with the necessary and urgent wisdom that will allow man to make other and new choices - to be born again.
capitalist society; scientific knowledge; complexity; ecology of knowledges