This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of infinite interconnections, possibilities and developments. His rejection of Hegelianism, as well as of (...) other enlightenment philosophies, can be understood at one level as a direct response to his rejection of the mechanical atomist, and organicist epistemological world views, based upon a Newtonian conception of a closed universe operating upon the basis of a small number of invariable and universal laws, by which all could be predicted and explained. The idea of a fully determined, closed universe is replaced; and in a way parallel to complexity theories, Foucault's own approach emphasises notions such as self‐organisation and dissipative structures; time as an irreversible, existential dimension; a world of finite resources but with infinite possibilities for articulation, or re‐investment; and characterised by the principles of openness, indeterminism, unpredictability, and uncertainty. The implications of Foucault's type of approach are then explored in relation to identity, creativity, and the uniqueness of the person. The article suggests that within a complexity theory approach many of the old conundrums concerning determinism and creativity, social constructionism and uniqueness, can be overcome. (shrink)

Two types of sustainability definitions are contrasted. ‘Social scientific’ definitions, such as that of the Brundtland Commission, treat sustainability as a relationship between present and future welfare of persons. These definitions differ from ‘ecological’ ones which explicitly require protection of ecological processes as a condition on sustainability. ‘Scientific contextualism’ does not follow mainstream economists in their efforts to express all effects as interchangeable units of individual welfare; it rather strives to express sensitivity to different types and scales of impacts that (...) present activities can exert on the future. We can therefore express the moral obligation to act sustainably as an obligation to protect the natural processes that form the context of human life and culture, emphasizing those large biotic and abiotic systems essential to human life, health, and flourishing culture. Ecosystems, which are understood as dynamic, self-organizing systems humans have evolved within, must remain ‘healthy’ if humans are to thrive. The ecological approach to sustainability therefore sets the protection of dynamic, creative systems in nature as its primary goal. (shrink)

A consensus is building that our planet has entered the so-called age of the Anthropocene—a post-Holocene epoch defined by the significant impact of humans on geological, biotic and climatic planetary processes. On the one hand, there is good reason to exercise caution in relation to this concept of the “Age of Man.” At a time when immoderate anthropogenic impact poses a serious threat to ecological integrity and balance, calling an epoch after ourselves does not necessarily demonstrate the humility we may (...) need to espouse. Moreover, discourses of the Anthropocene risk overwriting important differences among human.. (shrink)

This paper considers the importance of bioethics for sustainable development proposing an extension of prevailing use of the word, from anthropocentric consideration of pathological states of human life, disease and aging, to prevention of pathology of living style and living space, which can be expressed as eco ethics. Ignorance of bioethics is at the background of environmental, moral and social crisis, having in mind health as a state of complete physical, mental, social and environmental well being. Global civilization depends on (...) observance of bioethics on local level just like moral health of society depends on respect of moral values on the level of family and community. Considering that protection of environment and biodiversity is inseparable from protection of family home, cultural diversity and identity, assuming that local environment is existential living space of family and community, which are conscious and responsible part of living world, then sustainable development begins with application of above eco principles on local level with the help of appropriate policy, research, education, eco design and eco space planning towards home oriented development. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss several of the factors that jeopardize our understanding of the nature of qualitative experiences and the mind. I incorporate the view from neuroscience to clarify the na.

As a result of contemporary environmental problems, scientists are focusing their interests on developing a greater understanding of nature. Described in this paper is a view of life and the environment as a case of complex systems analysis; this analysis results in a series of general principles which are manifested in life and bioprocesses. These ‘eco-principles’ will be very useful as guidelines for the eco-restructuring of technology as well as the reorientation of human activities towards a sustainable lifestyle which includes (...) the economy, society, management of industry, the university and even the church. The goal is a society which will be in harmony with the laws of nature. (shrink)

Complexity theory challenges educational philosophy to reconsider accepted paradigms of teaching, learning and educational research. However, though attractive, not least because of its critique of positivism, its affinity to Dewey and Habermas, and its arguments for openness, diversity, relationships, agency and creativity, the theory is not without its difficulties. These are seen to lie in terms of complexity theory's nature, status, methodology, utility and contribution to the philosophy of education, being a descriptive theory that is easily misunderstood as a prescriptive (...) theory, silent on key issues of values and ethics that educational philosophy should embrace, of questionable internal consistency, and of limited ‘added value’ in educational philosophy. The paper sets out key tenets of complexity theory and argues that, though it is useful for educational philosophy, it requires new conceptual tools and mind‐sets to comprehend fully its significance. (shrink)

A comment on Paul Schoemaker's target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14 (1991), p. 205-215, "The Quest for Optimality: A Positive Heuristic of Science?" (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00066140). This comment argues that the optimizing model of decision leads to an infinite regress, once internal costs of decision (i.e., information and computation costs) are duly taken into account.

The distinguishing characteristic of complex co-evolving systems is their ability to create new order. In human systems this may take the form of new ways of working or relating, new ideas for products, procedures, artefacts, or even the creation of a different culture or a new organizational form. This article will explore the creation of new order using the principles of complexity and the concepts of creativity and innovation. It will argue that innovation can be facilitated by an enabling environment (...) based on the logic of complexity and describe how one organization (the Humberside Training and Enterprise Council) co-created an innovative environment and changed its culture, ways of working, thinking, and relating. (shrink)

This contribution aims to explain how European Criminal Law can be understood as constitutive of European identity. Instead of starting from European identity as a given, it provides a philosophical analysis of the construction of self-identity in relation to criminal law and legal tradition. The argument will be that the self-identity of those that share jurisdiction depends on and nourishes the legal tradition they adhere to and develop, while criminal jurisdiction is of crucial importance in this process of mutual constitution. (...) This analysis will be complemented with a discussion of the integration of the first and the third pillar as aimed for by the Constitutional Treaty, which would bring criminal law under majority rule and European democratic control. Attention will be paid to two ground breaking judgements of the European Court of Justice that seem to boil down to the fact that the Court actually manages to achieve some of the objectives of the CT even if this is not in force. This gives rise to a discussion of how the CT may transform European criminal law in the Union to EU criminal law of the Union, thus producing an identity of the Union next to the identities prevalent in the Union. The contribution concludes with some normative questions about the kind of European identity we should aim to establish, given the fact that such identity will arise with further integration of criminal law into the first pillar. (shrink)

Critical realism, especially as developed by Roy Bhaskar, embodies at its heart systemic and holistic concepts such as totality, emergence, open systems, stratification, autopoiesis and holistic causality. These concepts have their own long history of development in disciplines such as systems thinking and cybernetics, but there is an absence in Bhaskar’s writings, and that absence is a lack of any reference to the corresponding systems literature. The purpose of this paper is threefold: (i) to demonstrate the extent of this correspondence; (...) (ii) to show that critical realism can benefit from an exposure to these other discourses; and (iii) to show that systems thinking too can gain philosophically from critical realism. (shrink)

Sciences are often regarded as providing the best, or, ideally, exact, knowledge of the world, especially in providing laws of nature. Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of non-equilibrium chemical processes—this being also an important attempt to bridge the gap between exact and non-exact sciences [mentioned in the Presentation Speech by Professor Stig Claesson (nobelprize.org, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977)]—has had this ideal in mind when trying to formulate a new kind of science. Philosophers (...) of science distinguish theory and reality, examining relations between these two. Nancy Cartwright’s distinction of fundamental and phenomenological laws, Rein Vihalemm’s conception of the peculiarity of the exact sciences, and Ronald Giere’s account of models in science and science as a set of models are deployed in this article to criticise the common view of science and analyse Ilya Prigogine’s view in particular. We will conclude that on a more abstract, philosophical level, Prigogine’s understanding of science doesn’t differ from the common understanding. (shrink)

What difference does the philosophical revolution of Deleuze and Guattari make to our understanding the early Christianity? In honour of the fortieth anniversary of publication of A Thousand Plateaus, this article argues that the discipline of Christian origins is currently premised on a historically condemned mode of subjectivity, that of subject/object metaphysics. The philosophical processes found in A Thousand Plateaus are particularly apposite to the current dilemma of Christian origins: as a rhizome-book consisting of plateaus, machines, singularities and non-representational concepts, (...) this book models new modes of thinking that can help the discipline rejuvenate itself and accomplish new tasks which are presently beyond its reach – for Deleuzian philosophy privileges the virtual over the actual, becoming over being, machinic transformations over static structures, and semiotics over linguistics. (shrink)

In the case of living beings – the very concept of “level” of organization becomes obscure: it suggests a value-based assessment, assigning notions like “lower” and “higher” with rather vague criteria for constructing the ladder of perfection, complexity, importance, etc. We prefer therefore the term “domain”, entities ranking equal. Domains may represent natural entities as well as purely human constructs developed in order to gain understanding of some facets of living things; living, evolved beings as well as those abstract constructs, (...) such as genotype and ‘niche’ which have been developed in the search for better understanding of such living things. Delimitation of such domains is sometimes a question of the dexterity of the researcher, and sometimes draws from the tradition in a given field. Such domains are not completely translatable to each other. Rather, they interact by a process that we call here reciprocal formation. Life is unique among multi-domain systems. In contrast to purely physical systems, life is a semiotic system driven by the historical experience of lineages, interpreted and re-interpreted by the incessant turnover of both individuals and their communities. This paper provides cases of domain interrelations, and addresses two questions: How do new qualities of inter-domain interaction emerge historically? How do new domains emerge in evolution. Two approaches, physical and biosemiotic, are discussed as we seek to get a better understanding of the overarching tasks. (shrink)

My book Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning basically refers to all kinds of human hypothetical cognition, also of creative kind. During the research related to the preparation of that book I soon had the opportunity to examine the studies regarding the human process of continuous delegation and distribution of cognitive functions to the environment to lessen cognitive limitations, also and especially in the case of what has been called ‘manipulative abduction’. These design activities are closely (...) related to the process of cognitive niche construction, which I will specifically address in this article. Niche construction should be regarded as a second major participant, after natural selection, in evolution. Indeed, by altering their environment and partly controlling some of the energy and matter fluxes in their ecosystems, organisms are capable of changing some of the natural selective pressures in their local environments. The question I plan to answer is the following: we need to hypothesize a fundamental role of non-genetic information in the evolution, but what kind of evolution could we obtain in this case? I will illustrate that in building various mediating structures, humans transform the environment and create cognitive niches. Thus, humans and other non-human animals become ecological engineers and chance seekers, involved in the processing, the alteration, and even the creation of external structures to reduce or suppress their cognitive limitations. Hence, this article will address a detailed analysis of the role of extragenetic information in evolution and what this process of selection selects for purposeful organisms, so niche-constructing ones. (shrink)

Viewed from an evolutionary standpoint, emotions can be understood as situation-specific patterns of energy consumption related to behaviors that have been selected by evolution for their survival value, such as environmental exploration, flight or fight, and socialization. In the present article, the energy linked with emotions is investigated by a strictly energy-based simulation of the evolution of simple autonomous agents provided with random cognitive and motor capacities and operating among food and predators. Emotions are translated into evolving patterns of energy (...) consumption related to situation-specific behaviors. As a result, a variety of behaviors resembling emotions emerge, each with a specific pattern of energy consumption. There is little difference between emotion-like behaviors on individual and collective levels. The fact that these patterns evolve under a strictly energetic selection regime indicates the interesting role and adaptive advantage of emotions as situation-specific energy savers. Although gained through an approach characterized by a highly reduced complexity, these findings support a quantitative understanding of emotions that may improve the existing qualitative approaches and could have far-reaching implications for further research on and conceptualization of emotions and their interactions with cognition. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the Chinese worldview on equilibrium/nonequilibrium and yin-yang in the context of science and draws the correlative aspects with irreversible thermodynamics and quantum reality, such as instability, nonlinearity, nonequilibrium, and temporality. The paper argues that Prigogine's expressions on dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, complexity, and irreversibility resonate with the principles in Yijing. Instability, far-from-equilibrium, irreversibility, probability, bifurcation, and self-organisation are intrinsic properties of nature appearing at all levels. Information is (...) the basis of all changes. The agency of change is the human with a consciousness interpreting the information existing in the probability space between heaven and earth. The paper outlines a modelling approach with the self-organising human in the centre between heaven and earth, representing living systems as discrete dynamical systems presented with binary yin-yang choices. The concepts of yin-yang and information causality are central to Yijing’s understanding of change and are clarified in this paper. (shrink)

The paper examines connections between ontology and finance. The ontological debates concerning the role of finance are examined between two opposing schools of thought that can be labelled, very broadly, ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘realist’. These two schools of thought have had momentous repercussions in understanding what is a good society. Each school defines Nature in particular ways which can be explored using ontology and philosophical insight. Our theoretical investigation aims to accommodate Nature in community financial deliberations. A positive role for government (...) is advocated to finance environmental infrastructure initiatives. For example, precautionary strategies to address climate change must be funded. New roles for finance and government are proposed to align human relationships with Nature. Environmental precautionary principles must be developed in conjunction with finance theory to maintain decent standards of living for all. Reliance on impersonal market forces will not be enough to save the planet given the power of some over the many in the neoliberal arena. (shrink)

“There are more things in heaven and earth,Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”—Shakespeare, HamletDeacon’s incompleteness thesis refers to hidden causal features of nature that are ab...

This article presents a case for the revaluation of vitalism in sociological theory. It argues for the relevance of such a Lebenssoziologie in the global information age. The body of the article addresses what a vitalist sociology might be through a consideration of Georg Simmel. The analysis works from the juxtapositon of vitalist monadology with postivist atomism. It shows how Simmel drew on the Kantian cognition to develop an idea of the social. Here Kant’s Newtonian atomism was transformed into Simmel’s (...) Darwinian atomism. ‘Form’, for Kant, is the a priori of the cognitive categories. For Simmel form is the functions that constitute the social a priori. The other of form is substance. Simmelian ‘substance’, we see, is understood as ‘life’. We view this in the context of Leibniz’s monadology. In this the monad is simple substance as difference. The monad is self-organizing, conceived on the lines of not the extensivity of res extensa, but the intensivity of res cogitans; the monad is possessed with memory as trace; it is comprised of relations of perception; it is reflexive. In each case monadology is systematically contrasted with atomism. We consider the Bergsonian and Nietzschean impetus in Simmel’s shift from Darwinian atomistic evolution to monadological creative evolution. We compare Marx’s labour theory of value with Simmel’s ‘life theory of value’. For Marx it is labour that makes up value-substance: for Simmel life is value-substance. We examine Simmel’s core notion of life as social substance: as a primordial inter-subjectivity of flux. We conclude with a contrast of such ‘flux’ and flow: of such a flux of ‘becoming’ and invention in contrast to the flows of domination of today’s global capitalism. (shrink)

Classical ethology, with its emphasis on separability of parts, has largely failed to do justice to the wholeness of the individual animal, to the integrity of group behaviour and to the continuity between observable behaviour and consciousness. Field theory has potentialities to do better, as illustrated in this paper with reference to morphogenetic and behavioural fields. A behavioural domain is delineated — playlike behaviour — where field theory is particularly relevant. It is shown that the concept of symmetry can suggest (...) new questions as well as explain some generally known phenomena of group behaviour. New interpretations of displacement activities and of etho-ecological adaptations are offered, both of which involve the whole individual animal. (shrink)

Orthodox business ethics, conventional management theory, and a great deal of higher education embody the overriding emphasis accorded to analysis by yesteryear''s science. An alternative strategy, exemplified by the war stories told by a Confederate Genral, is more consistent with late 20th century science in general and soft systems methodology in particular.The characteristic way of management that we have taught... is to take a complex system, divide it into parts, and then try to manage each part as well as possible. (...) And if that''s done, the system as a whole will behave well, and that''s absolutely false because it''s possible to improve the performance of each part taken separately and destroy the system at the same time. (shrink)

The acronym Developmental systems theory (DST) has been introduced into the literature on development in at least three different contexts in recent years – twice for DST, and before that, for Dynamical Systems Theory – and in all cases, to designate a new perspective for understanding development. Subtle but significant differences in argument and aims distinguish these uses, and confound the difficulty of saying just what DST is. My aim in this paper is to disambiguate these different terms – both (...) to call attention to the difference of perspectives, and to carve out a conceptual space for the concrete issues at stake. (shrink)

An interdisciplinary fusion between the philosophy of science and the teaching of science can help to eradicate the disciplinary rigidity entrenched in both. In this paper I approach the history of sciencethematically, identifying general themes which transcend the boundaries of individual disciplines. Such conceptual themes can be used as a basis for an interdisciplinary introduction to university science, encouraging certain important cognitive skills not exercised during the disciplinary training emphasised in traditional approaches. Courses which teach themes such as conservation, randomness, (...) and holism/reductionism have already proved successful, and these innovations should encourage philosophers and historians to explore the exciting new possibilities which arise from stepping outside the confines of a single discipline. (shrink)