Preface

This book is thought as a necessary integration of the general reductionist and analytical attitude dominant in our culture. Reductionism and analytical approaches have produced significant results in many fields of contemporary knowledge giving a great contribution to relevant scientific discoveries and to their technological application, but their validity has been improperly universalized as the only and best methods of knowledge in every domain. It is nowadays clear that analytical or mereological approaches are inadequate to solve many problems and that we should introduce – or support the diffusion of - new concepts and different research attitudes. A good candidate to support such a shift is the well known theoretical approach based on the concept of “system” that no more considers the elementary constituents of an object, but the entity emerging from the relations and interactions among its elementary parts. It becomes possible to reconstruct several domains, both philosophical and scientific, from the systemic point of view, introducing fresh ideas in the research in view of a general rational vision of the world on more comprehensive basis.