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

ORGANISMIC BIOLOGY 1)2)5)

A set of new concepts about the nature of living organisms that was introduced between 1920 and 1940 by a number of biologists as an alternative theory of life, as opposed to reductionist mechanistic concepts as well as vitalists ones

The basic tenet of organismic biology is that life cannot be understood without a general integrative view of the internal organization of the organism, i.e. the existence of functional and structural interrelations between its constitutive elements. Thus "the whole is more than the sum of its parts"

F. CAPRA writes: "Since these organizing relations are patterns of relationships immanent in the physical structure of the organism, organismic biologists assert that no separate, nonphysical entity is required for the understanding of life…"… the concept of organization has been refined to that of self-organization in contemporary theories of living systems"(196, p.25)

Autopoiesis

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]


We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible: