Systems philosophy concerns primarily the conceptual foundations for a systems-based framework in the world. The role of traditional philosophy has been eclipsed by the rising sun of the empirical-analytical sciences and conventional philosophy became in the later half of the 20th Century an exclusive, restrictive, entirely academic preoccupation. The call for holism and general integration of scientific knowledge across disciplinary boundaries has entailed rethinking the place of philosophy from a systems perspective. Modern scientific worldview demands increasingly a systems-based approach in order to achieve the comprehensiveness of perspective it needs, and this in turn demands a reinstatement of a philosophical framework that both transcends and incorporates scientific theory and methodology across all fields of knowledge. The time has arrived therefore for a full-blown systems philosophy to envision the leading role of the sciences in the 3rd Millennium and to lead scientists beyond the role of remaining pawns in service of authoritarian puppet-masters.

Systems philosophy addresses some of the most vital questions concerning the foundations of reality and the role of human beings in the mediation of this reality. How we answer these questions in part determines how we will respond and adapt to our ever changing world, and in the final analysis may determine the outcome of human survival upon earth. There is a deep connection between our worldview and our behavioral and social adaptation in the world--we cannot clearly say that worldview guides our behavior or that worldview is guided by behavior, but surely there is a very high positive correlation between the way people look at and think about the world and how they respond and interact with others in their world, their position and status-identity in that world.

The central challenge of systems philosophy, to be relevant in a contemporary world, is to successfully mediate and overcome the Mind/Body dichotomy that has served to dialectically define and constrain Western Philosophy for the past two and a half millennia. This dichotomy affects how we approach scientific problem solving and how we carve up our experience. We may say simply, from a systems philosophy perspective, this dichotomy is really a hen or egg dilemma, and it is a false dichotomy. Mind and body are two heads of the same coin. Simply put, mind is a function of the integration and action of the brain as a complex system of neural activity.

We may say that from a systems perspective, the synergistic, holistic qualities and emergent properties that are associated with a unified system at one level of observation, do not exist and cannot be adequately explained in terms of the analysis of the components of the system or their individual functional specializations. But if we observe the pattern of integration of the various parts of a system, the principle of synergistic holism follows logically. That the component parts of systems become bound up within the system, and their behavior constrained by the operational environment and external conditions of the system, is a part of the process. 

That there occurs mostly a degree of variability in the behavior and structure of component parts, does not affect the general outcome or sense of dynamic equilibrium maintained by the system as a whole. We may observe that real systems would not be capable of adaptation and long term life if they did not have built-in variability. All real systems have built-in tolerance limits that permit component parts to vary from one instance to the next, within the same system, or if we compare one system from another. This is as true of physical systems like stars as it is of biological systems like animals or human systems like societies.

All classification in science proceeds from these tenets, as does all logical relationship that we infer in phenomena. The concept of causality is derivative of this basic principle--we can call the developmental behavior of systems complex causality. From this, we can see that typical clausal logic is a constrained form of symbolic analogy, and we may refer to it as symbolic homology.

There are several sets of caveats that need to be pointed out. First, we have inherited an abstract conception of the world from Western Philosophers, and we have a decided tendency to confuse the abstraction with the reality. We have a further tendency to not allow for variability of rules or relationships, even in our basic concepts of positive or logical identity--a thing is a thing, and not something else. If a thing is an abstraction that stands for a set of real things, then we can understand that real things may vary in detail and still remain parts of the set as a whole. The consequences for this tendency, we can call it a logical fallacy of absolute identity, or the fallacy of over-abstraction, is to deny or fail to see the exceptions to the rule that we set down for ourselves, and to fail to see, especially in science, that the rules follow the exceptions and observations, and not the other way around.

The second set of caveats concerning this issue is the quest for absolute certainty in our scientific knowledge of our world, a quest we have again inherited from an abstract, mathematical model of the world. Failure to gain a sense of certainty due to the inherent variability encountered in real systems and their components results in a kind of "epistemo-pathology" of knowledge--a neurosis that attaches itself to a rigid, obsessive-compulsive form of methodology in the quest for knowledge that leads to the rejection of evidence that does not fit the type.

The final set of caveats concerning this issue involves the paradigmatic structure of scientific theory and methodology as this is articulated by scientific communities, as pointed out by Thomas Kuhn for the field of physics and cosmology. A community arrives at a received worldview, a theoretical model of their knowledge forte', as demonstrated by a body of methods and the results of these methods. As a consequence of the consensus and reinforcement for conformity, the constraint of the community as a knowledge system controlling the state of affairs regarding a particular problem set and subject, competing or alternative viewpoints are not permitted to coexist or be developed, even if new evidence emerges as the consequence of empirical investigation that does not clearly or cleanly fit the received view of the world.

It was the physicist Niels Bohr who, encountering the problem of the relativity of knowledge concerning the exact instantaneous state of an electron in its orbit about an atomic nucleus, derived the conclusion that scientific knowledge is not built on exactitude or on the notion of direct causal determinism, but instead on the built-in possibility of the complementariness of alternative viewpoints depending upon the context of observation, and it was this same philosopher of science who extended this epistemological and methodological paradigm to the biological and anthropological sciences as well. I think it was he who should be first credited with the insight of natural systems philosophy, even if he did not at the time directly refer to it as such. 

Contemporaneous to Niels Bohr, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy arrived at similar conclusions, especially concerning the behavior and structure of cells and organisms, and who sought to extend the principles in a systematic way to all fields of the sciences. It was von Bertalanffy who appended the name "general systems theory" to this philosophical approach towards the sciences, and who afterward elaborated many of the basic tenets of this approach.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II