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A Volume in Exploring Complexity Emergence, Complexity, And A Volume in Exploring Complexity Volume Four Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: PRECURSORS AND PROTOTYPES i Exploring Complexity Series Volume 1: Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from the North and South Fritjof Capra, Alicia Juarrero, Pedro Sotolongo, & Jacco van Uden (eds.) ISBN 9780976681465. Volume 2: Classic Complexity: From the Abstract to the Concrete Kurt A. Richardson & Jeffrey A. Goldstein (eds.) ISBN 9780979168833. Volume 3: Origins of Self-Organization, Emergence and Cause Vincent Vesterby ISBN 9780981703206. Volume 4: Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: Precursors and Prototypes Alicia Juarrero & Carl A. Rubino (eds.) ISBN 9780981703213. ii Exploring Complexity: Volume Four Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: PRECURSORS AND PROTOTYPES Edited and Introduced by Alicia Juarrero & Carl A. Rubino Publishing 17947 W Porter Ln Goodyear, AZ 85338 iii Credits Thanks goes to the following for help in obtaining original texts, and/or for per- mission to allow reprinting: Clarendon Press (Chapter I), Longman (Chapter II), Indiana University Press (Chapter III), Macmillan (Chapters VI and X), Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul (Chapter VIII), Cambridge University Press (Chapters IX and XII), and University of Minnesota Press (Chapter XIII). Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: Precursors and Prototypes Exploring Complexity Book Series: Volume 4 Edited and introduced by: Alicia Juarrero & Carl A. Rubino Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928120 ISBN13: 978-0-9817032-1-3 Copyright © 2008 ISCE Publishing, 17947 W Porter Ln, Goodyear, AZ 85338, USA All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, me- chanical, photocopying, microfi lming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America iv To the Memory of Ilya Prigogine v CONTENTS Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: Precursors and Prototypes - Introduction Alicia Juarrero & Carl A. Rubino ..........................................................................1 CHAPTER I Analytic of Teleological Judgement (1790) Immanuel Kant ......................................................................................................21 Originally published as Kant, I. (1790). “Analytic of Teleological Judgement,” in Critique of Judgement, Part II, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, First Division. CHAPTER II On the Composition of Causes (1843) John Stuart Mill ......................................................................................................39 Originally published as Mill, J.S. (1843). “Of the Composition of Causes,” in A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientifi c Investigation, London, UK: Longman (1970), pp. 242-247. CHAPTER III Design and Chance (1883) Charles S. Peirce .....................................................................................................47 Untitled manuscript dating from December 1883 - January 1884. Peirce’s editors have supplied the title, noting that he “almost certainly” used the manuscript for a January 1884 lecture on “Design and Chance.” See Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 4: 1879-1884, edited by Christian J.W. Kloesel et al., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 544-554. CHAPTER IV Mechanism and Experiment (1893) Henri Poincaré .......................................................................................................57 Originally published as Poincaré, H. (1893). “Le Mécanisme et l’Expérience” Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 1: 534-37. Translated by Carl A. Rubino and Alicia Juarrero with the assistance of Laurence Lemaire. Chapter V The Evolution of Life—Mechanism and Teleology (1911) (Extract) Henri Bergson .........................................................................................................61 Originally published as Bergson, H. (1911). “The Evolution of Life— Mechanism and Teleology,” in Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell (trans.), New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 1-29. vi Chapter VI The Order of Qualities (1920) Samuel Alexander .................................................................................................79 Originally published as Alexander, S. (1920). “The Order of Qualities,” in Space, Time and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow 1916-1918, Chapter 2, London, UK: Macmillan, pp. 45-73. Chapter VII Emergence (1923) C. Lloyd Morgan .....................................................................................................99 Originally published as Morgan, C.L. (1923). “Emergence,” in Emergent Evolution: The Gifford Lectures, Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the Year 1922, Chapter 1. London, UK: Williams and Norgate, pp. 1-34. Chapter VIII Mechanism and its Alternatives (1925) C. D. Broad ............................................................................................................117 Originally published as Broad, C.D. (1949). “Mechanism and its Alternatives,” in The Mind and it Place in Nature, Chapter 2, London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 48-94. Chapter IX Selections from “Science and the Modern World” (1925) Alfred North Whitehead ...................................................................................151 Originally published in Whitehead, A.N. (1932). Science and the Modern World, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (revised edition). Chapter X The Holistic Universe (1926) Jan C. Smuts ..........................................................................................................165 Originally published as Smuts, J.C. (1926). “The Holistic Universe,” in Holism and Evolution, Chapter 12, New York, NY: Macmillan, pp. 317-345. Chapter XI The Meanings of ‘Emergence’ and Its Modes (1926) Arthur O. Lovejoy ...............................................................................................185 Originally published as Lovejoy, A.O (1926). “The Meanings of ‘Emergence’ and Its Modes,” Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, London: Longmans, Green, pp. 20-33. vii CHAPTER XII Order, Disorder, and Entropy (1944) Erwin Schrödinger ..............................................................................................199 Originally published as Schrödinger, E. (1944). “Order, Disorder, and Entropy,” in What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, Chapter 6, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 72-80. CHAPTER XIII The Concept of Emergence (1956) Paul E. Meehl & Wilfrid Sellars ........................................................................207 Originally published as Meehl, P.E. and Sellars, W. (1956). “The Concept of Emergence,” in H. Feigl and M. Scriven. (ed.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 239-252. CHAPTER XIV An Outline of General System Theory (1950) Ludwig von Bertalanffy ....................................................................................219 Originally published as von Bertalanffy, L. (1950). “An Outline of General System Theory,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 1: 134-165. Index ....................................................................................................................237 viii Introduction Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization: PRECURSORS AND PROTOTYPES Introduction Alicia Juarrero & Carl A. Rubino oes nature resemble a ramp or a ladder? Are nature’s ubiquitous dis- continuities merely apparent differences, fully reducible to quantitative Ddifferences, or do they signal qualitative ruptures that cannot be under- stood to be the smooth accumulation of simple accretions or growth? Are quali- tative differences merely illusory, fully explicable once we capture the laws of the deepest level of subatomic particles? Would such a “theory of everything” demonstrate that what seem to be novel and different properties and levels of or- ganization are just that—mere appearances reducible to that fundamental level and thus predictable according to its laws? Is there really “nothing new under the sun?” Or, on the contrary, is Ilya Prigogine correct in maintaining, as Robert Artigiani puts it, that “nature is too rich to be described in a single language” be- cause qualitatively new ontological levels of organization emerge in the course of evolution?1 These problems have perplexed human beings as far back as we can see. In times whose view of the world focused on the inviolate and qualitative dis- continuities between the earthly and divine—or the physical and the non-phys- ical—realms, fundamentally novel properties, species, and similar phenomena were presumed to have appeared only as the products of separate, individual acts of creation that took place at the beginning of time. In the book of Genesis, for example, their distinctiveness is marked metaphorically (or literally, if you wish) by the day of their occurrence, and their “nature” does not change over time. One legacy of this way of viewing the world is the presumption that the universe is a fundamentally static place in which only superfi cial characteristics can change. Essential properties are thought to be unchangeable and eternal because they were uniquely and separately created. But now that advances in cosmology
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