Category: Books
-
Book Review: The Structure of Value
The Structure of Value: Foundations of Scientific Axiology is Robert S. Hartman’s seminal work on Formal Axiology. Robert S. Hartman was born in Germany in 1910. Seeing the Nazis organize evil, he fled Nazi Germany for his opposition to Hitler. He devoted the rest of his life to organize good. This led him to a…
-
Book Review: A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality
A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality by Donald W. Sherburne is a great guide to Whitehead’s philosophy! Alfred North Whitehead’s book Process and Reality (commonly referred to as PR) is extremely difficult to read.1 PR is rich and suggestive, but its opacity is monumental.2 The text of PR is in very poor condition. Whitehead…
-
Book Reeview: A Quaker Approach to Research
A Quaker Approach to the Conduct of Research: Collaborative Practice and Communal Discernment by Gray Cox with Charles Blanchard, Geoff Garver, Keith Helmuth, Leonard Joy, Judy Lumb, and Sara Wolcott has grown out of a decade of experiments employing Quaker processes of communal discernment in research.1 The book itself is the product of collaborative work.…
-
Operating as mechanism vs. organism
Elisabet Sahtouris makes the following distinction between operating as mechanism vs. organism in her book EarthDance:1 MECHANISM ORGANISM Allopoietic Autopoietic Inventor created Self-created Hierarchic structure Holarchic embeddedness Top-down command Holarchic dialog/negotiation System engineered System negotiated Repaired by engineers/experts Repairs itself Evolution by external redesign Evolution by internal redesign Exists for product or profit Exists for health and…
-
Principles of healthy living systems
Elisabet Sahtouris identifies the following Organizational and Operational Principles of Healthy Living Systems in her book EarthDance (my emphasis in bold):1 Self-creation (autopoiesis) Complexity (diversity of parts) Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy) Self-reflexivity (autognosis-self-knowledge) Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics) Response ability — to internal and external stress or change Input/output of matter/energy/information from/to other…
-
Book Review: How Does Societal Transformation Happen?
How Does Societal Transformation Happen? Values Development, Collective Wisdom, and Decision Making for the Common Good is a small 87 page book, or booklet, by Leonard Joy. Joy has more than half a century of experience of development research and fieldwork, and a long involvement with collaborative decision-making processes.1 Valuing human dignity Leonard Joy sees…
-
Memes as organizing principles
Introduction This is a post in my series on organizing ”between and beyond.” Other posts are here. The purpose of this post is to explore Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan’s notion of memes. Memes and ˇMEMEs Beck and Cowan introduce the notions of memes (rhymes with themes) in their book on Spiral Dynamics.1…
-
Bok Review: If Aristotle Ran General Motors
Tom Morris asks in his book If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soulf of Business what Aristotle would have done to “create lasting excellence and long-term success in the business world” (p.ix)? Tom Morris believes that “there are some basic truths … which undergird any sort of human excellence or flourishing” (p.x). “Regardless of…
-
Book Review: Pathways to Possibility
Pathways to Possibility: Transforming Our Relationship with Ourselves, Each Other, and the World is written by Rosamund Stone Zander, who has “dedicated the last fifteen years” to understanding “human growth and expansion” (p.xiv). The book teaches its readers to distinguish between two broad approaches to life: the “downward spiral” and “radiating possibility” (p.xv). Two ways…
-
The territory beyond
Chapter Twenti-six, in Pathways to Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander, is about The Territory Beyond. Rosamund Stone Zander writes that The Territory Beyond is “beyond what we know and expect of ourselves as human beings, beyond the norms of achievement …, beyond our ordinary measures …, and beyond what we picture as vitality” (p.189). In The…