Systems philosophy

Systems philosophy is a discipline aimed at constructing a new philosophy (in the sense of worldview) by using systems concepts. The discipline was first described by Ervin Laszlo in his 1972 book Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought. It has been described as the "reorientation of thought and world view ensuing from the introduction of "systems" as a new scientific paradigm".

Soon after Laszlo founded systems philosophy it was placed in context by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of general system theory, when he categorized three domains within systemics namely:

Systems philosophy consists of four main areas:

The term "systems philosophy" is often used as a convenient shorthand to refer to "the philosophy of systems", but this usage can be misleading. The philosophy of systems is in fact merely the element of systems philosophy called "systems ontology" by von Bertalanffy and "systems metaphysics" by Laszlo. Systems ontology provides important grounding for systems thinking but does not encompass the essential focus of systems philosophy, which is about articulating a worldview grounded in systems perspectives and humanistic concerns.

Systems philosophy was founded by Ervin Laszlo in 1972 with his book Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought. The Foreword was written by Ludwig von Bertalanffy.

"Systems philosophy", in Ervin Laszlo's sense of the term, means using the systems perspective to model the nature of reality, and to use this to solve important human problems (Laszlo, 1972). Laszlo developed the idea behind systems philosophy independently of von Bertalanffy's work on General System Theory (published in 1968), but they met before Introduction to Systems Philosophy was published and the decision to call the new discipline "systems philosophy" was their joint one. Writing Introduction to Systems Philosophy took five years, and in his autobiography Laszlo calls it "my major work".

Laszlo's "great idea", that made systems philosophy possible, was that the existence of a general system theory that captures the "patterns" that recur across the Systemics, who themselves capture "patterns" that recur across the specialized disciplines, entails that the world is organised as a whole, and thus has an underlying unity. In this light, nature's special domains (as characterized by the specialized sciences) are contingent expressions or arrangements or projections of an underlying intelligibly ordered reality. If the nature of this underlying unity and the way it conditions phenomenal reality could be understood, it would provide a powerful aid to solving pressing sociological problems and answering deep philosophical questions.

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