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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Arts and Humanities

Portland State University

2023

Systems theory

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Basic Dualism In The World, Martin Zwick Nov 2023

The Basic Dualism In The World, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” This paper supports Harman’s assertion from a systems theoretic perspective and illustrates it with some examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. But dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components not only imply one another but are related, and where this spatial dyad is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or an additional orthogonal dyad.


Words And Diagrams About Rosenstock-Huessy’S Cross Of Reality, Martin Zwick Feb 2023

Words And Diagrams About Rosenstock-Huessy’S Cross Of Reality, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper is a systems theoretic examination of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s “cross of reality,” a structure that fuses a spatial dyad of inner-outer and a temporal dyad of past-future into a space-time tetrad. This structure is compatible not only with the "human-centered" point of view that Rosenstock-Huessy favours, but also with the "world-centered" point of view inherent in science. The structure, based in his analysis of speech, is applied by him to a wide variety of individual and collective human phenomena, including language, religion, and social critique. To appropriate terminology used by physicists, the cross of reality could be viewed as …