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Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: Precursors and Prototypes
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 Poincaré, 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 Schrödinger, 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.
256 pages, Paperback
First published August 6, 2010
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August 10, 2022
What I have to say is probably based on the one hand in technical ignorance and on the other in philosophical prejudice, but for what it's worth:
I have an interest in emergence and complexity theory as means of dealing with biological reductionism in the world of psychology. It's not a casual interest; I like millions of other people around the world have suffered from the untender ministrations of biological psychiatry, and I'm among those who hope to do something about the bullshit before I die. My little bit of undergraduate reading was in philosophy, so when I take up intellectual arms, that's the locker I reach into first. So that's why I picked up this book.
So a couple of basics: The printed work has all the hallmarks of a print-on-demand job, and the typesetting and some other mechanical issues are occasionally not great, so as an object, two stars. The editors' introduction isn't in itself of great value, other than to narrowly contextualize each of the selections. So basically, there's no real reason to mess with this book if you can get at the selections by other means.
As to the selections themselves, I ate up the first third of the book, which runs Kant, 'Analytic of Teleological Judgement', Mill, 'On the Composition of Causes', an essay by C.S. Peirce and a chapter from 'Creative Evolution' by Bergson. All good stuff, although the Peirce essay was kind of obscure.
From there, to me, it's downhill as we head into a couple hundred pages of early mid-century English writers who it seems to me have made themselves handmaidens to the research programs of the specialists, rather than daring the imaginative leaps that could actually inspire great new science. I mean, this I guess is the whole sad saga of what has passed for philosophy among the Anglos since the Vienna Circle or whatever, so new news here.
The exception is a set of excerpts from Al Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World.' I did find his style as frequently infuriating as it was inspiring, but he's hitting on all the right cylinders it seems, and I am likely doomed to hurt my poor brain on a bunch more of his stuff before it's all over.
Anyway, I guess the up side is that here you have a book that will put you on the map with some names and the basics of a set of writers in English who may crop up in theoretical discussions in systems/emergence/complexity; on the downside, you might be a sucker like me and slog through all of it before realizing that having the map is worth more than making the actual walk.
The real payoff seems to be having some pointers to where in the catalogues of some known greats of yesteryear and overyonder you can find related issues. Since I read this book, references to the Kant chapter in particular have already cropped up elsewhere, so that's a good indicator.
I have an interest in emergence and complexity theory as means of dealing with biological reductionism in the world of psychology. It's not a casual interest; I like millions of other people around the world have suffered from the untender ministrations of biological psychiatry, and I'm among those who hope to do something about the bullshit before I die. My little bit of undergraduate reading was in philosophy, so when I take up intellectual arms, that's the locker I reach into first. So that's why I picked up this book.
So a couple of basics: The printed work has all the hallmarks of a print-on-demand job, and the typesetting and some other mechanical issues are occasionally not great, so as an object, two stars. The editors' introduction isn't in itself of great value, other than to narrowly contextualize each of the selections. So basically, there's no real reason to mess with this book if you can get at the selections by other means.
As to the selections themselves, I ate up the first third of the book, which runs Kant, 'Analytic of Teleological Judgement', Mill, 'On the Composition of Causes', an essay by C.S. Peirce and a chapter from 'Creative Evolution' by Bergson. All good stuff, although the Peirce essay was kind of obscure.
From there, to me, it's downhill as we head into a couple hundred pages of early mid-century English writers who it seems to me have made themselves handmaidens to the research programs of the specialists, rather than daring the imaginative leaps that could actually inspire great new science. I mean, this I guess is the whole sad saga of what has passed for philosophy among the Anglos since the Vienna Circle or whatever, so new news here.
The exception is a set of excerpts from Al Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World.' I did find his style as frequently infuriating as it was inspiring, but he's hitting on all the right cylinders it seems, and I am likely doomed to hurt my poor brain on a bunch more of his stuff before it's all over.
Anyway, I guess the up side is that here you have a book that will put you on the map with some names and the basics of a set of writers in English who may crop up in theoretical discussions in systems/emergence/complexity; on the downside, you might be a sucker like me and slog through all of it before realizing that having the map is worth more than making the actual walk.
The real payoff seems to be having some pointers to where in the catalogues of some known greats of yesteryear and overyonder you can find related issues. Since I read this book, references to the Kant chapter in particular have already cropped up elsewhere, so that's a good indicator.
Displaying 1 of 1 review