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Havana's Instituto de Filosofia's First Biennial International
Seminar on the Philosophical, Epistemological and Methodological
Implications of Complexity Theory, was held in January 2002 in
Havana, Cuba's capital city. The seminar was aimed at familiarizing
Cuban researchers and professors in a more direct way with some of
the current trends - and widespread scope - of the expanding field
of complexity thinking, affording them the possibility of personal
contacts with some of the people engaged in that effort. The
seminar was attended by specialists from fifteen countries, ranging
from Chile to Australia along the West-East axis, and from Norway
to South Africa along the North-South one. There were participants
from developed and underdeveloped countries. This book contains
selected papers from the 'Complexity 2002' seminar, edited by
Fritjof Capra (author of 'The Tao of Physics', 'The Web of Life: A
New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems' and 'The Hidden
Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living'), Alicia Juarrero
(author of 'Dynamics in Action'), Pedro Sotolong, and Jacco van
Uden (author of 'Complexity and Organization'). The papers have
been organized in four parts: I. Sources of Complexity: Science and
Information; II. Philosophical, Epistemological and Methodological
implications; III. Organizational Implications; IV. Global and
Ethical Implications. The papers in Part I can be said to approach
the phenomenon of complexity at a very basic level. Here the issues
being addressed revolve around the very fundamental question of why
the complexity sciences are so important: What are the most
fundamental lessons to be learned from studying complex systems?
Papers included in Part II engage in a broader, philosophical
investigation of some of the most general ontological,
epistemological and methodological implications of the complexity
approach, showing how very old questions are currently being
reformulated and/or reinterpreted in the light of complexity
thinking. Papers that appear in Part III address various important
issues about the links between complexity and social,
organizational, business and management questions. Finally, Papers
in Part IV return once again to more global implications of
Complexity thinking, this time dealing with Ethical and
Globalization issues of contemporary world.
Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization have become vital
focuses of interest not only in the fields of science and
philosophy but also in the wider worlds of business and politics.
This book presents a series of essays by thinkers who anticipated
the significance of those issues and laid the foundations for their
current importance. Readers of this book will encounter the
important and varied figures of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill,
Charles Saunders Peirce, Henry Poincare, Henri Bergson, Alfred
North Whitehead, and the British "Emergentists" Samuel Alexander,
C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. They will also find essays by the
South African thinker and statesman Jan Smuts, the American
philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent physicist Erwin
Schrodinger, two more recent thinkers on emergence, P. E. Meehl and
Wilfred Sellars, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of
General Systems Theory. In their detailed and comprehensive
introduction to the collection, editors Alicia Juarrero and Carl A.
Rubino set the essays in contexts stretching from Heraclitus,
Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel to some of the religious,
scientific, and philosophical challenges we face today.
Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization have become vital
focuses of interest not only in the fields of science and
philosophy but also in the wider worlds of business and politics.
This book presents a series of essays by thinkers who anticipated
the significance of those issues and laid the foundations for their
current importance. Readers of this book will encounter the
important and varied figures of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill,
Charles Saunders Peirce, Henry Poincare, Henri Bergson, Alfred
North Whitehead, and the British "Emergentists" Samuel Alexander,
C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. They will also find essays by the
South African thinker and statesman Jan Smuts, the American
philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent physicist Erwin
Schrodinger, two more recent thinkers on emergence, P. E. Meehl and
Wilfred Sellars, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of
General Systems Theory. In their detailed and comprehensive
introduction to the collection, editors Alicia Juarrero and Carl A.
Rubino set the essays in contexts stretching from Heraclitus,
Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel to some of the religious,
scientific, and philosophical challenges we face today.
Havana's Instituto de Filosofia's First Biennial International
Seminar on the Philosophical, Epistemological and Methodological
Implications of Complexity Theory, was held in January 2002 in
Havana, Cuba's capital city. The seminar was aimed at familiarizing
Cuban researchers and professors in a more direct way with some of
the current trends - and widespread scope - of the expanding field
of complexity thinking, affording them the possibility of personal
contacts with some of the people engaged in that effort. The
seminar was attended by specialists from fifteen countries, ranging
from Chile to Australia along the West-East axis, and from Norway
to South Africa along the North-South one. There were participants
from developed and underdeveloped countries. This book contains
selected papers from the 'Complexity 2002' seminar, edited by
Fritjof Capra (author of 'The Tao of Physics', 'The Web of Life: A
New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems' and 'The Hidden
Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living'), Alicia Juarrero
(author of 'Dynamics in Action'), Pedro Sotolong, and Jacco van
Uden (author of 'Complexity and Organization'). The papers have
been organized in four parts: I. Sources of Complexity: Science and
Information; II. Philosophical, Epistemological and Methodological
implications; III. Organizational Implications; IV. Global and
Ethical Implications. The papers in Part I can be said to approach
the phenomenon of complexity at a very basic level. Here the issues
being addressed revolve around the very fundamental question of why
the complexity sciences are so important: What are the most
fundamental lessons to be learned from studying complex systems?
Papers included in Part II engage in a broader, philosophical
investigation of some of the most general ontological,
epistemological and methodological implications of the complexity
approach, showing how very old questions are currently being
reformulated and/or reinterpreted in the light of complexity
thinking. Papers that appear in Part III address various important
issues about the links between complexity and social,
organizational, business and management questions. Finally, Papers
in Part IV return once again to more global implications of
Complexity thinking, this time dealing with Ethical and
Globalization issues of contemporary world.
For religious persons, the notion of human being is tied
inextricably to the notion of God (or the gods) and turns on this
question: what is human being? How did we, with our almost infinite
capacities for thought, change, and domination, come to be? Imbued
with powers far beyond any other animal, humans are too faulty to
be considered gods themselves. Yet, the idea of God (or the gods)
appears in all distinctive human cultures: it names the other pole
of human-it designates a being who realizes perfectly our
imperfectly realized nature. With the rise of new sciences come
ancient anxieties about how we should define human being. In the
nineteenth century, electricity and magnetism fascinated experts
and captivated the lay public. In the twenty-first century,
advances in neuroscience open up vast new possibilities of
mimicking, and perhaps emulating human being. In this book twelve
scholars and scientists ask what-if anything-distinguishes Brain
from Mind, and Mind from Self and Soul.
For religious persons, the notion of human being is tied
inextricably to the notion of God (or the gods) and turns on this
question: what is human being? How did we, with our almost infinite
capacities for thought, change, and domination, come to be? Imbued
with powers far beyond any other animal, humans are too faulty to
be considered gods themselves. Yet, the idea of God (or the gods)
appears in all distinctive human cultures: it names the other pole
of human_it designates a being who realizes perfectly our
imperfectly realized nature. With the rise of new sciences come
ancient anxieties about how we should define human being. In the
nineteenth century, electricity and magnetism fascinated experts
and captivated the lay public. In the twenty-first century,
advances in neuroscience open up vast new possibilities of
mimicking, and perhaps emulating human being. In this book twelve
scholars and scientists ask what_if anything_distinguishes Brain
from Mind, and Mind from Self and Soul.
What is the difference between a wink and a blink? The answer is
important not only to philosophers of mind, for significant moral
and legal consequences rest on the distinction between voluntary
and involuntary behavior. However, "action theory" -- the branch of
philosophy that has traditionally articulated the boundaries
between action and non-action, and between voluntary and
involuntary behavior -- has been unable to account for the
difference.
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of
cause and explanation -- one that takes all causes to be of the
push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be
prooflike -- underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero
then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on
complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical
constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations,
including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A
different logic for explaining actions -- as historical narrative,
not inference -- follows if one adopts this novel approach to
long-standing questions of action and responsibility.
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