Center Leo Apostel

Description

Francis Heylighen:

"The Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) was established at the VUB in 1995 around this worldview program. Its mission has been to construct integrated worldviews, combat fragmentation and loss of meaning, and promote what Apostel called “deep dissemination”: not merely popularizing isolated scientific results, but going deeply into scientific ideas and then making their broader significance understandable to people outside the specialist domain.

Over the years, CLEA has included roughly thirty affiliated researchers from a very wide range of backgrounds—computer science, psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, physics, engineering, the humanities, anthropology and the arts. Since 2024 the Center has merged with the Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (CLPS), which continues another important part of Apostel’s legacy as a logician and philosopher of science.

A broad guiding idea within CLEA is that the universe can be understood as an evolving network of systems. Matter, life, intelligence, consciousness and society were not simply imposed according to a fixed blueprint; they emerged step by step through processes of self-organization. A second principle is thinking beyond boundaries: research should not be constrained by established disciplinary divisions, paradigms or frameworks. Ideas from very different domains can sometimes illuminate one another. Quantum cognition, one of the domains we have investigated for example, applies mathematical structures developed in quantum theory to understand cognitive processes.

This is one sense of transdisciplinarity: integrating ideas across scientific disciplines. A second, increasingly important sense is bringing scientific inquiry into interaction with people outside academia. CLEA has always had seminars attended by non-academics, and our art-science activities deliberately avoid a rigid separation between scientific and artistic approaches. Thinking beyond boundaries, however, should not mean indulging in arbitrary speculation. It must be combined with critical thinking: ideas have to be checked, tested and abandoned when they do not work."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/integrating-worldviews-a-tool-for?)