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Dynamism (metaphysics)
Dynamism is a general name for a group of philosophical views concerning the nature of matter. However different they may be in other respects, all these views agree in making matter consist essentially of simple and indivisible units, substances, or forces. Dynamism is sometimes used to denote systems that admit not only matter and extension, but also determinations, tendencies, and forces intrinsic and essential to matter. More properly, however, it means exclusive systems that do away with the dualism of matter and force by reducing the former to the latter. The word was coined by Thomas Carlyle, who contrasted dynamism with mechanism. Leibniz's formulation Dynamism is the metaphysics of Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) that reconciles hylomorphic substance theory with mechanistic atomism by way of a pre-established harmony, and which was later developed by Christian Wolff (1679–1754) as a metaphysical cosmology. The major thesis for Leibniz follows as a consequences ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle (4 December 17955 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher. Known as the "Sage writing, sage of Chelsea, London, Chelsea", his writings strongly influenced the intellectual and artistic culture of the Victorian era. Carlyle was born in Ecclefechan, a village in Dumfriesshire. He attended the University of Edinburgh where he excelled in mathematics and invented the Carlyle circle. After finishing the arts course, he prepared to become a minister in the Burgher (Church history), Burgher Church while working as a schoolmaster. He quit these and several other endeavours before settling on literature, writing for the ''Edinburgh Encyclopædia'' and working as a translator. He initially gained prominence in English-language literary circles for his extensive writing on German Romanticism, German Romantic literature and philosophy. These themes were explored in his first major work, a semi-autobiographical philosophical novel entitled ''Sartor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vis Activa
''Vis viva'' (from the Latin for "living force") is a historical term used to describe a quantity similar to kinetic energy in an early formulation of the principle of conservation of energy. Overview Proposed by Gottfried Leibniz over the period 1676–1689, the theory was controversial as it seemed to oppose the theory of conservation of quantity of motion advocated by René Descartes. Descartes' quantity of motion was different from momentum, but Newton defined the quantity of motion as the conjunction of the quantity of matter and velocity in Definition II of his '' Principia''. In Definition III, he defined the force that resists a change in motion as the ''vis inertia'' of Descartes. Newton's third law of motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) is also equivalent to the principle of conservation of momentum. Leibniz accepted the principle of conservation of momentum, but rejected the Cartesian version of it. The difference between these ideas was whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Object-oriented Ontology
In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. This is in contrast to post-Kantian philosophy's tendency to refuse "speak ngof the world without humans or humans without the world". Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently (as Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another. Object-oriented ontology is often viewed as a subset of speculative realism, a contemporary school of thought that criticizes the post-Kantian reduction of philosophical enquiry to a correlation between thought and being ( correlationism), such that t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xavier Zubiri
Xavier Zubiri (; ; 4 December 1898 – 21 September 1983) was a Spanish philosopher. Zubiri was a member of the Madrid School, composed of philosophers José Ortega y Gasset (the founder of the group), José Gaos, and Julián Marías, among others. Zubiri's philosophy has been categorized as a "materialist open realism", which "attempted to reformulate classical metaphysics, in a language that was entirely compatible with modern science". Biography Zubiri first received a philosophical and theological formation in Madrid and Rome. Later, he deepened his studies in philosophy through his graduate studies in Louvain, writing his dissertation on phenomenology. In 1929, Zubiri's critical interest in this current of thought took him to Freiburg, when he already was a professor in Madrid. There, he studied with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In 1930, Zubiri moved to Berlin, where he studied physics, philology and biology. There, he was hosted in Harnack House, which enab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Ross Ashby
William Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby. His two books, ''Design for a Brain'' and '' An Introduction to Cybernetics'', introduced exact and logical thinking into the brand new discipline of cybernetics and were highly influential. These "missionary works" along with his technical contributions made Ashby "the major theoretician of cybernetics after Wiener". Early life and education William Ross Ashby was born in 1903 in London, where his father was working at an advertising agency.Biography of W. Ross Ashby The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, 2008. From 1921 he studied at [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy
Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (19 September 1901 – 12 June 1972) was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today. Bertalanffy grew up in Austria and subsequently worked in Vienna, London, Canada, and the United States. Biography Ludwig von Bertalanffy was born and grew up in the little village of Atzgersdorf (now Liesing) near Vienna. Ludwig's mother Caroline Agnes Vogel was seventeen when she married the thirty-four-year-old Gustav. Ludwig von Bertalanffy grew up as an only child educated at home by private tutors until he was ten and his par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Systems Theory
Systems theory is the Transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" when it expresses synergy or emergent behavior. Changing one component of a system may affect other components or the whole system. It may be possible to predict these changes in patterns of behavior. For systems that learn and adapt, the growth and the degree of adaptation depend upon how well the system is engaged with its environment and other contexts influencing its organization. Some systems support other systems, maintaining the other system to prevent failure. The goals of systems theory are to model a system's dynamics, Theory of constraints, constraints, conditions, and relations; and to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He wrote the three-volume ''Principia Mathematica'' (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell. ''Principia Mathematica'' is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library."The Modern Library ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Process Philosophy
Process philosophy (also ontology of becoming or processism) is an approach in philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only real experience of everyday living. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or ''becoming'' as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becomes sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential. In physics, Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the "phys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (; ; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published ''Le Bergsonisme''. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and Intuition (knowledge), intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. Bergson was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930, France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France, where his views were seen as opposing the Secularism in France, secular and scientific attitude adopted by the French Third Republic, Republic's offici ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monad (philosophy)
The term ''monad'' () is used in some cosmic philosophy and cosmogony to refer to a most basic or original substance. As originally conceived by the Pythagoreans, the Monad is therefore Supreme Being, divinity, or the totality of all things. According to some philosophers of the early modern period, most notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, there are infinite monads, which are the basic and immense forces, elementary particles, or simplest units, that make up the universe. Historical background According to Hippolytus, the worldview was inspired by the Pythagoreans, who called the first thing that came into existence the "monad", which begat (bore) the dyad (from the Greek word for two), which begat the numbers, which begat the point, begetting lines or finiteness, etc. It meant divinity, the first being, or the totality of all beings, referring in cosmogony (creation theories) variously to source acting alone and/or an indivisible origin and equivalent comparators. Py ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
