Towards a Post-Bertalanffy Systemics

This book, based on papers from the Sixth National Conference of the Italian Systems Society, is devoted to identifying, discussing and understanding possible interrelationships of theoretical disciplinary improvements recognized as having prospective fundamental roles for a new post-Bertalanffy Systemics able to deal with problems of complexity in a generalized way where inter-disciplinarity consists, for instance, in a disciplinary reformulation of problems, as from algebraic to geometrical, from military to political, from biological to chemical, and transdisciplinarity is related to the study of such reformulations and their properties. Examples of new issues introduced by such theoretical disciplinary improvements and studied within various disciplines include fractality, topological dynamics, networks, as well as quantum theories and concepts. The included chapters cover these topics and more.§§The interdisciplinary nature of the original Systemics and its power of generalization were given, overall, by the fact that the problems and solutions of one discipline become problems and solutions for another. Today, the modeling and interpretation of multidisciplinary approaches and representations facilitate this. The context, however, has changed dramatically. The challenge is still theoretical generalization and application, even where we have a lot of specificit§ies, but§know very little on how to combine them. It is not simply replacing the old§with the new, but to develop strategies to recognize, represent, model and act§on new levels and combine, by considering, for example, multiple§representations, functions and emergence. In various disciplines this is§already done, and inevitably well, since targets and projects are well§specified and oriented. The challenge is to do it for Systemics, with the§vocations of cultural and theoretical generalization.§