This article identifies already existing theoretical and methodological commonalities between evolutionary biology and phenomenology, concentrating specifically on their common pursuit of origins. It identifies in passing theoretical support from evolutionary biology for present-day concerns in philosophy, singling out Sartre’s conception of fraternity as an example. It anchors its analysis of the common pursuit of origins in Husserl’s consistent recognition of the grounding significance of Nature and in his consistent recognition of animate forms of life other than human. It enumerates and (...) exemplifies five basic errors of continental philosophers with respect to Nature, errors testifying to a philosophical fundamentalism that distorts the intricate interconnections and relationships of Nature in favor of a preferred knowledge rooted in ontological reductionism. It shows that to discover and appreciate the common ground, one must indeed study “the things themselves.”. (shrink)

Many contemporary theories of “complex” dynamical phenomena have been used to explain and understand a wide range of matters pertaining to the health of learning organizations; however, a more sensitive approach is required which also takes into account the lived-experience of health where the experiencing subject is also a part of an epistemological framework which Letiche1 describes as “phenomenal complexity theory.” To be sure, there is a need for a complexity-related framework which also studies human consciousness by attending to the (...) structures of lived-experience—in the case of this paper, the lived-structures of health. To this end, this paper examines: the notion of “health” through a circulation of lived-experience; the concept of dynamical systems in an emerging framework for studying healthy learning organizations. (shrink)