General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications

by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

Book Overview

An attempt to formulate common laws that apply to virtually every scientific field, this conceptual approach has had a profound impact on such widely diverse disciplines as biology, economics,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807600156
• ISBN13: 9780807600153
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: George Braziller
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

STILL the best book on the subject

I've looked high and low for a text summarizing systems theory and I write this review in near shock having just finished this book. I say "shock" because I just can't believe how remarkably undated this book is after nearly 40 years (first edition 1969). I've read books by Checkland, Lazlo, Weinberg and many others but nothing summarizes the systems world view better than this classic. You've gotta love a scientist/philosopher who quotes Aldous Huxley liberally. I'd give it six stars if I could.

General System Theory (Author:Ludwid von Bertalanffy).

The best view, writed on general system theory, selected and edited to show the evolution of systems theory and to present its applications to problem solving. Recommended on such widely diverse disciplines as biology, economics, psychology, and demography.

He changed modern population theory

Although he wrote a lot about the general theory of systems, I think it is his approach to the problems of how living systems interact with their environment in a catabolic manner that makes him really important. He has had impact from fields like biology to fluid dynamics. He set a standard for how we think about history and with Lewis F. Richardson The Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson (Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson, Vol 2)and Isaac AsimovThe Foundation Trilogy made a science possible.

A new way of looking at how things work together

Perhaps the best way to start this review is with Bertalanffy's own words: "Compared to the analytical procedure of classical science with resolution into component elements and one-way or linear causality as basic category, the investigation of organized wholes of many variables requires new catagories of interaction, transaction, organization, teleology..." "These considerations lead to the postulate of a new scientific discipline which we call general system theory. It's subject matter is formulation of principles that are valid for "systems" in general, whatever the nature of the component elements and the relations or "forces" between them... "General system theory, therefore, is a general science of wholeness"... Wholeness is not new, the Chinese and Greeks had their own versions, but what Bertalanffy did is make it an authentic science.

The best intent to transcend the mechanistic worldview

GST is certainly the best intent we have to transcend the mechanistic worldview from the point of view of the new science. And there is just one way to transcend that framework and it just by positing a new sphere to manage complexity: the sphere of life.Teilhard, Bergson, Bertanffy were "biologists" but also philosophers, great philosophers and this is probably why today the Science of Complexity is looking at Life, and why the new thinkers are more and more aware that if we want to understand organizations, human organizations, we must first understand life. So we find a clear turn in books about complexity and administration trying to learn from the lesson of life...this is the only way to enter the age of adaptation as Thomas Petzinger calls it. Our time owes to GST a great deal, and as so, GST stands as a monument to that whole movement toward the global nature of our civilization of the same kind of The Phenomenon of Man and Creative Evolution.