BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

ENTELECHY 3)5)

A supposed vital force driving a living system toward self-fulfillment.

Originally, for ARISTOTLE, entelechy was the mode of being of the completely realized structure of something, i.e. the result of the actualization of its potentialities.

This quite abstract notion was re-introduced as a kind of conceptual crutch by H. DRIESCH, unable to otherways understand some biological experiments, as for instance that a sea urchin egg, segmented in two parts, was able to produce two perfectly formed urchins.

DRIESCH vitalism was never admitted by many biologists and a protracted debate between vitalists and mechanicists ensued. Finally, it became apparent to L.von BERTALANFFY and J. WOODGER, creators of organismic biology, that the conceptual deficit corresponded to our lack of good models of organized complexity.

Overtones of Aristotle's entelechy seem perceptible also in some very recent physical theories, as D. BOHM's implicate order, and the concept of decoherence in microphysics, and Prigogine's emergence through dissipative structuration.

In metaphorical terms the "real" world is starting to appear somewhat similar to the fading smile of Lewis Carrol's Cheshire cat.

In the same vein, F. CAPRA refers himself to Goethe: "Each creature is but a patterned gradation (Schaffierung) of one great harmonious whole "(1997, p. 21)

Capra also notes further on that the classical aristotelian concept of entelechy "as a process of self-regulation", was "postulated by DRIESCH (as) a separate entity, acting on the physical system without being part of it" (ibid. p.26)

This typically mechanistic view, combined with the need for a "deus ex-machina" was later on rejected by organismic biology, which somehow went back to Aristotle's concept.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]


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