|
HI, Judith,
I was impressed with your two messages
I picked up among too many in my incoming mail. What others said on them I
do not yet know. While these days some bewilderment continues around the
Rosenean spirit, I admired your courage for your intention to give it a new and
free birth. His spirit will empower you. Otherwise Rosenean ideas will be
squeezed and belittled sooner or later if it is sold to university, in a real or
metaphorical sense, before they see the light once more. Not everybody has
breath in their body like you have - I positively envy and empathise with
you in that - a fully fledged Rosenean spirit and perception. Tendencies
nowadays are more in the direction of reductionism with its nature of quick
pay-off, rather than systemic which is, per force, complex.and requires more
means to express itself fully than the simplistic approach. I am glad to
hear that you are equipped with such multiple means at your service
together with the rosenean soul. It is also very pertinent that you now feel
ready to put your facilities to work for the dissemination of Rosenean spirit to
be picked up whoever can perceive. WE all know that this was the method used all
the way in the ancient times as well as throughout the historical periods
until our time as the best way to make sink complex ideas into the minds of
people, think of Greek tragedies; Mesopotamian epic poems; Shakespear; Goya;
Goethe; Tolstoy; Mozart and as most recent examples Holywood films, such as
Commander The Master; The Last Samurai etc.to cite a few. People with
ability to get the gist and differing levels of emotions out of them and they
are not the same anymore. Where as the products and ideas of the reductionist
approach are per force limited in content with their limited end purposes. They
may or not serve the overall purpose of life in general, the humanity in
particular which seeks happiness as its highest priority.
You are now the mother of your father's spirit
and ideas which silently belong to many others, even to the whole humanity
waiting to be born. You cannot carry this fulness for long. The are now to
be born in many forms and numbers. This is a quicker way than struggling within
a relatively closed and at times bewildered groups, though willing to
make their environment more pervious to let new spirit to come in. Now with J.
Kineman' s renewed and clear intention a more comprehensive network could be
created, why not call it "Rosenean Network" with an appropriate interpretation
to help the Network's elements to sense their own 'raison d'etre' within the
same umbrella spirit. The work and hopefully the success of this network is
important also to effect a mental shift within the ISSS in general.
I am already converted to this approach with an
intuitional urge while exercising my profession (civil engineering) thinking
that what ever we do should be in concordance with the happiness of human beings
as well as with the whole living and non-living systemsi,i.e environment let
aside others beyond our planet, which we have also started to disturb in the
name of scientific advancement within purposes possibly blind to humanity's
happiness as a whole.I therefore formally and informally studied humanities
including anthropology, philosophy, history of ideas, history of art, music etc.
Plus, contrary, to what my profession suggest I am female. This way I considered
myself better fit to operate professionaly than earlier times with so many
unanswered queries in mind. I hope, I have expressed myself clearly as the
first, English is not my mother tounge and the second, the speed of ideas cannot
be quickly dealt with using a common language. It needs art as its environment,
as the art is the mother of and greater than the science. Their link should
never be broken as very explicitely cried out by C.P. Snow in his
book "Two Cultures".
I wish you a very successful and productive year as the mother
of your father's spirit.
My best,
Aydin
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2004 3:56
AM
Subject: Selling Rosenean theory to the
University
I have been aware for a long time, long before my father
died, that his work would remain mostly obscured by the way it was written and
presented. As I've already pointed out; this didn't cause him a moment's
concern because he couldn't have cared less how it was taken, or even whether
it was taken at all (or seen).... I respected his total commitment to the work
itself, and his amazing internal self-sufficiency and self-directedness. But I
was personally frustrated by the injustice embodied by the facts-- that
his work was labeled inaccurately as either mathematical biology (listed under
M, for Math) or as Systems Theory, etc.... where it would never be seen by
biologists or philosophers.... Plus the fact that his insistence on using so
much mathematical notation in his illustrations (as examples of the ideas he
was putting forward) would automatically make a majority of browsers at
the bookstore close the book and put it back on the shelf because of the
appearance of a need for expertise in mathematics in order to understand the
concepts. The reason those things bothered me is that his ideas make so much
sense to me, and it struck me as a deep injustice in the fabric of the cosmos
that the ideas would simply pass unnoticed by the people most wanting to find
them, unless something was done to remediate the "camouflage" that the
ideas were unwittingly wrapped up in.
When he died in 1998, my father left his work to me. His words to
me on the subject, when he had mentioned that he had written his will in that
way, were; "You don't have to DO anything with it, Kid. I don't need you to
spend your time on my work or to spend your energy on breathing "life" into
it. Either it will have a life of its own based on its own merits or it won't.
If the work doesn't develop its own life, it probably wasn't meant to anyway."
I envied his equanimity over the prospect of his life's work just
disappearing! That's what happens when you spend your life doing what you love
and loving it for very personal reasons. He was a lucky guy, my Dad. But there
is no way I'm going to let his life's work languish in obscurity, knowing what
I know about how applicable these ideas are to just about every avenue of
human thought and endeavor. I spent a great deal of time hanging out with my
father over my lifetime. In my adult years, more of that time was inclusive of
his work-- both as we travelled to meetings or symposia together, or as he was
writing new stuff. I became a writer myself, after school, and the nature of
that beast is similar no matter what kind of creative writing one is doing.
Therefore, writing is something else that we shared, and it was discussed
along with all the rest. The friendship that grew between my father and me
(out of a combination of the deep familial bond, a similarity in basic brain
wiring, a compatibility of temperaments, and a creative approach to the world)
was the bedrock on which I built my own foundations. This means, among other
things, that I am a writer who has a comprehensive understanding of
Rosennean concepts and an even deeper and more comprehensive understanding of
the man, Robert Rosen. Somehow, it just seems fated to me that I will be
writing a lot of material translating my father's ideas into various other
"languages", meaning the languages of philosophy, ecology, medicine, social
systems, and so on... so that the ideas will finally be accessible to their
many different audiences. I also encourage anyone else who expresses an
interest in writing papers based on Rosennean concepts to do so, and make it
their own; develop things further, create something new out of the basics that
my father developed. That's what "developing a life of its own"
means.
The first half of this year is already earmarked to be devoted,
in an intensive way, to getting my father's "stuff" out there.
That's the task I've set myself. (I can almost hear him reproaching me
for it, too!) The second half of the year will be devoted to my own
"stuff"(fiction and art)(which I am always working on, all the time,
anway...).
Judith
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 7:23
PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Selling Rosenean
theory to the University
Greetings,
I've been lurking on this list for a month or
two now, prodded in this direction at the behest of my friend Dan
Fiscus. I thought I'd put in my two cents worth on these recent
topics. Forgive me if this ends up going all over the place.
A brief introduction is in order, I
suppose. I teach philosophy of science and physics at Iowa State
University, but my research specialty is philosophy of ecology and
philosophies of complexity. I, Dan and another young systems
ecologist, Brian Fath, have been working on an NSF grant proposal for a
workshop studying the issue of holism and reductionism in theories of
ecological succession. I'll be starting a paper in the next two months
or so on arguments for the noncomputability of (M,R)-systems for a
philosophy of mathematics conference I'll be attending in April. I'll
be looking primarily at Rosen's papers on (M,R)-systems up to the early
70s. This will be my first paper on Rosenean concepts, though not my
first paper on the distinctive features of complex networks.
I've never met anyone in any philosophy
department I've worked at who has even heard of Robert Rosen, and
this includes the graduate school I attended, University of Western Ontario,
which has a very strong program in the philosophy of science. Even
among my fellow grad students working on issues in the philosophy of the
life sciences, I was the only student who'd run across his work. There
are philosophers who are familiar with his work, of course, but they are few
and far between. I was lucky enough to be in a grad program where our
resident logican was a category theorist too, and my exposure to category
theory helped draw my attention to Rosen's work.
On the issue of resistance in the
university:
- were I to volunteer to give a talk on Rosen
to our department, I'm sure it would be greeted with interest. I can't
imagine a philosophy department that wouldn't at least recognize the
philosophical interest of Rosen's work. I couldn't get away, though,
with presenting Rosen strictly in Rosen's terms; I'd have to make an effort
to connect Rosen to problems and traditions that are familiar to
philosophers. I'm aware that this can sound odd to fans of Rosen's
work (how could anyone not see the relevance of his views to classic
philosophical problems?), but it's a bit of myth that philosophers engage
directly with archetypical philosophical problems. It's more accurate
to say that philosophers engage with philosophical problems as they have
come to be understood within certain traditions, where the touchstones are
lineages of persons rather than the concepts themselves (e.g. the tradition
of philosophy of language identified by Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein,
Kripke, early Putnam, Boyd, ...). It's often been said that Rosen
wrote primarily for himself, and while this may be the source of much of his
originality, it's also partially responsible for his failure to make any
significant impact on philosophy. Academic philosophy has
been, and continues to be, a quintessentially peer-involving
activity, both synchronically and diachronically. Rosen's
lack of interest in argumentative engagement with others who may be
interested in similar topics, or who may have objections to his
way of understanding things, is, I think, the main reason for his relative
invisibility among philosophers. Anyone who wants to bring
Rosen's work to the attention of others must (as has been said
before in this thread) learn to communicate with the "other" in a language
that is meaningful to them.
[Anecdote: I lent a copy of Life
Itself to the aforementioned category theorist at my grad school, to
see what he thought of it. He said he found the book both fascinating
and very difficult to get a handle on. Now, this is a guy who thinks
in morphisms and forgetful functors, and is well schooled in the history and
philosophy of mathematics and logic, and is himself a holder of some
unorthodox philosophical views. And he couldn't get a handle on Rosen
or the significance of his thinking for foundational issues in
philosophy. I think this is a testament not to the fact that Rosen
wasn't really interested in writing for other people. Those of us
interested in Rosen really need to reconceptualize Rosen for different
audiences and different contexts.]
- On the issue of the
Dawkins-Dennett/Lewontin-Gould debate as the fulcrum for philosophical
discussions in biology, it's certainly false to say
that philosophers of biology are solely interested in
this argumentative tradition (not that I'm implying that anyone here
has said that). Discussions of "function", for example, have a long
history in the philosophy of biology, and are standard topics in
undergraduate and graduate textbooks. This is certainly an area
where one could offer a Rosenean alternative to the standard
approaches (in fact, I've been thinking of writing something on Rosen's
concept of function and making it connect with the (vast) literature on
biological function). However, outside of serious philosophy of
biology, I would agree that, when philosophers (ethicists,
epistemologists, political theorists, etc.) are exposed to issues in
biology, they tend to be on topics related to adaptationism and altruism
where the terms of the debate are framed by D-D/L-G.
- we have a graduate program here at ISU on
complex adaptive systems, and I've given the odd talk to the faculty and
students who comprise this group. Almost none of them have heard of
Rosen either. There are schools of complexity theory, as we all
know. This group is familiar with Sante Fe-style complexity theory
(Kauffman, Holland, Bak, etc.) and computational complexity (polynomial,
exponential, np-hard, etc.), but not much else. They would be happy to
hear something about Rosen, I'm sure. A lot of these folks, I think,
are also congenial to the notion that complexity theory may have
revolutionary, paradigm-busting implications. I'm sure I'll give
a version of my (M,R)-systems paper to this group some time in the
future.
- I have taught, and will be teaching regularly
in the future, a graduate course on the history and philosophy of ecology
for the graduate program in Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology at
ISU. My dealings with this crowd have been cordial, but here it's
become clear that there are deep resistances among many of the faculty to
holistic approaches in ecology and evolutionary theory. This is not
atypical for departments of biology and ecology in the US, though.
They are, however, quite to open to presenting the debate between
holists and reductionists as an effective teaching tool for
students, and as an important component of the intellectual history of
ecology and the life sciences. So, in a course like this I can get
away with a lot more than would an actual professor of ecology teaching a
course in ecological restoration or whatnot.
Ah, time's up for me. Judith, I'd
appreciate a copy of those Rosen biographical materials that you're offering
to list members, if you would be so kind. Thanks,
Kevin
Kevin deLaplante
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy and Religious
Studies
Iowa State University
|