Dynamic Systems in Nature and Society: Philosophical and Empirical Aspects

The project deals with the multiple roles played by dynamics in complex systems in nature and society. Ontological reductionism (the reduction of all levels of reality to their basic physical components) and epistemological reductionism (the inter-theoretic reduction of theories in special sciences to theories concerning more fundamental levels) were very influential throughout the 20th century, and the dynamic systems approach emerged as a main challenge to both. The project will investigate the nature of complex, time-dependant dynamic systems and the implications that they have for our understanding of causality, the nature of scientific explanation, as well as our understanding of physical, psychological, and social entities. To this end, the project will examine dynamic systems that can be found in biology, cognitive science, ethics, and social sciences such as economics. We expect that our main contribution to current scholarship will be our close examination of the phenomenon of interacting properties instantiated at different levels of the system at different time scales, a phenomenon that undermines reductionist approach. Furthermore, we aim to achieve a better insight into the higher level properties of complex systems (like an organism or social groups) by exploring very simple self-organizing and self-maintaining systems such as unicellular organisms, which has not been sufficiently elaborated in the current literature on philosophical aspects of dynamic systems.