Organicism (materialistic holism) has provided the philosophical underpinnings for embryology since the time of Kant. It had influenced the founders of developmental mechanics, and the importance of organicism to embryology was explicitly recognized by such figures as O. Hertwig, H. Spemann, R. Harrison, A. M. Dalq, J. Needham, and C. H. Waddington. Many of the principles of organicism remain i...

An examination of historical precedents for contemporary art practice using artificial life, in particular in the work of Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich. Similarities are identified between artificial life and the philosophical tradition of organicism; specific examples from Klee and Malevich indicate that those artists were engaged in a form of creative organicist thought which imagined the re...

Western science rests on the philosophical foundation of materialist monism, according to which only physical matter exists and therefore only physical matter can be known. Furthermore, matter is known to us only through the sense organs or indirectly through instruments. Consequently valid knowledge can only be derived from a logical interpretation of sensory experience. Materialist monism (he...

Alan M. Turing’s last published work and some posthumously manuscripts were dedicated to the development of his theory organic pattern formation. In “The Chemical Basis Morphogenesis” (1952), he provided an elaborated mathematical formulation origins biological form that had been first proposed by Sir D’Arcy Wendworth Thompson in On Growth Form (1917/1942). While arguably most mathematically de...

This article is a slightly summarised version of an invited plenary at the 3rd Aegean Seminar which took place at the Greek island of Samos in July 1992. The original title was “An Interpretive Systemological View of the Issue: ‘Environmental Fluctuations and Cultural Change in Island Societies`.” It is an hermeneutical inquiry into the interpretive context that provides full meaning to the iss...