REMINDER about Symposium II (W/H) of BAC 2001 towards Unity through Diversity

CALL for PAPERS and COMMENTS in order to participate in the Symposium II (W/H)

"Wholism (or Holism) The way forward into the 21st century"

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This Symposium is one of the events that has been planned as an Homage to
Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy. It has been conceived as a FORUM for
presentation of papers, lectures, speeches, posters and also an Open Space
for self-organized debates and discussions. It will take place in the

International Conference on Systems Thinking Globally Concerned

Bertalanffy Anniversary Conference BAC 2001

UNITY <==> through <==> DIVERSITY

November 1-4, 2001

University of Vienna and Vienna University of Technology

http://www.bertalanffy.org

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It aims at searching further how human beings may and also should learn to
develop their way of thinking for clearly seeing the forest before they may
start dealing with one or another tree; and also for grasping the meaning
of a tree before trying to handle one of the leaves or a flower or a fruit.

This intention takes into account that the Bacon's experimental method and
the Galileo's resolutive or analytic method which made possible the
emergence of the scientific method against the methaphysical approach
(apparently holistic) of the middle Ages have caused an increasing number
of larger difficulties to the evolvement of human thinking which
intrinsically searchs first to get a gestalt, global, molar, integrative,
organismic, synergistic,...or holistic or wholistic.view of the reality.
Humans could not survive if they were not capable of getting immediately
holistic insights about their concerns. But humans may and perhaps even
should push ahead the evolvement of their thinking recognizing (W)Holism as
an indispensable step.

(W)Holism is an approach that transcends both the metaphysical approach of
the Middle Ages and the scientific method, which has shown during the last
century that the successful conquest and transformation of natural
resources carried out by masses of people employed as human resources
generates huge and quite undesirable effects (wrongly qualified as side
ones) that make its assumed positive contributions more and more
questionable. (W)Holism is potentially more than just a global,
integrative or gestalt view that simply states that the "whole is more than
the sum of its parts" or that 'everything is interrelated with everything
else." Its belated emergence as a truly organismic and synergistic view of
life on this planet has started to help an increasing number of
researchers, scholars and experts to recognize that wholes and parts are
all moulded into an inseparable multilevelled continuum, a living matrix.
The ecosphere, the biosphere, the homosphere, the forest, the tree, the
leaves, the cells in the leaves, the living beings,... and the molecules
are integral components of a substance composed of
matter-energy-information which human beings should not continue dividing
unilaterally for making short term monetary and financial profits. At
present, humankind faces global problems reaching a crisis point. The main
reason for this is that prevailing decision-making processes completely
ignore the need for respecting a wholeness required to counteract the
devastating consequences of 'scientific' fragmentation.

Dear Reader, you are invited to send a 'position text ' (around 1000
words), arguments, comments and questions, for the Conversazione on W/H
that may take place before the Conference.

Abstracts of papers (500 -1000 words), for being submitted in the
Conference, may also be sent for being considered to elohimjl
<elohimjl@mail.zserv.tuwien.ac.at> and
"Gy�rgy J�ros" <gjaros@med.usyd.edu.au>

Your contribution is welcome in a normal e-mail message.

No attachments please

For taking part in the conversazione before the conference it is necessary
to become a subscriber sending the text:

subscribe bertalanffy-list
to
lists@igw.tuwien.ac.at

Everybody may visit http://www.bertalanffy.org/discus where all the
previous and following contributions for the debate will be included

Conference Fee:
Rich countries EURO 140
Poor countries EURO 70
Students EURO 50
Received on Sun Sep 2 03:11:54 2001