Abstract
Since its first steps in ancient Greece, philosophy has posed the ontological question: what should be recognized as real, and why? The question received different and heterogeneous answers in the course of history of philosophy, and my aim is to discuss whether it is possible to derive a coherent ontological proposal from the premises of systemic thinking. I will claim that systemic thinking is committed to pluralism both in epistemology and in ontology, because pluralism is a natural consequence of the systemic distinction of objects in different and irreducible levels of observation. If we recognize that we must adopt different levels of observation to describe different systemic levels (the well-known sub-systems, systems, systems of systems), we imply that we accept different epistemologies, each having its own criteria and validation methods suitable for each level, and that there are irreducible ontological differences among entities. We are thus committed to ontological and epistemological pluralism. An interesting moral and social consequence of pluralism is a tolerant attitude towards different perspectives and cultures, that can easily be transformed into a general ‘charity principle’ inspiring the regulation of multicultural societies.
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Notes
- 1.
Minati et al. (2016). The authors offer an updated bibliography of recent works in the systemic world.
- 2.
Among many, there are the Proceedings of Systemic Conferences organized by AIRS from 1998: Minati (1998), Minati and Pessa (2002), Minati et al. (2006, 2009, 2012, 2016). Three books of essays: Urbani Ulivi (2010, 2013, 2015). The tenth volume of the series “Handbook of the Philosophy of Science”: Hooker (2011). The Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica has published a section of “System researches in philosophy, the sciences and the arts” in the following numbers: (vol. CII (2), 2010; CIII (4), 2011; CIV (4), 2012; CVI, (3), 2014; CVII (1–2), 2015; CVIII, (2), 2016; CIX, (2), 2017).
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Plato exposes his theory of knowledge in Theaetetus, Meno, and Republic.
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The theologian Camillo Card. Ruini introduced systemic thinking in Catholic theology in order to better understand and prove the possibility that the human soul survives death. See Ruini (2017).
- 7.
Calogero (1927). In this book Calogero exposes his interpretation of human knowledge in Aristotle’s philosophy. Human knowledge has two levels: the first and fundamental one, called noetic, consists in the immediate apprehension of things as separate and determined by which human beings are in direct contact within the world. The second level, called dianoia, is the realm of judgment, where the unity of noesis is broken into subject-object propositional language and ideas are expressed and connected in a logic form.
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- 9.
Two “Big brain projects” have been launched independently in the United States and in the European Union, both in 2013, called, respectively, Brain Initiative (BI) and Human Brain Project (HBP). Human Brain Project explicitly aims to realize a computer simulation of the whole brain, to reach with the development of a new kind of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It puts overwhelming emphasis on technological development and on computing tools, leaving aside fundamental neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. It is a “paradigm shift” that goes in the direction of substituting scientific research with computation.
- 10.
Generally speaking mereology is the theory of parthood relations, concerning both the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole. A good presentation of mereology both in logic and in ontology can be found in Varzi (2016).
- 11.
Vitiello (2001). The author considers the brain as an open and dissipative system that through continuous interaction with its environment leaves in it a trace, or a copy, or a “Double”, where world objectiveness and the brain’s implicit subjectivity are conjugated.
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Ulivi, L.U. (2019). First Steps Toward a Systemic Ontology. In: Minati, G., Abram, M., Pessa, E. (eds) Systemics of Incompleteness and Quasi-Systems. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15277-2_2
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