Organicist Movement in Philosophy and Culture
Discussion
Robert Hanna et al. :
(in the interwar period 1920-1940)
"There was also an emerging organicist movement, expressing itself in philosophy, the applied and fine arts, and the formal and natural sciences alike, including, in philosophy,
- Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory in 1896, Creative Evolution in 1907,
- Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity in 1920,
- John Dewey’s Experience and Nature in 1925, and especially
- Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” in Process and Reality in 1929;
in the applied and fine arts,
- the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the other members of the Prairie School,
- the “golden period of Scandinavian design” in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, and
- the poetry of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; and,
in the formal and natural sciences,
- C. Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution in 1923, and
- Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell in 1944l Schrödinger’s break-through book initiated
- non-equilibrium thermodynamics and complex systems dynamics, as developed by Ilya Prigogine and his associates, and by J.D. Bernal, in the second half of the 20th century; and alongside and inspired by this work, it also primed
- the autopoietic approach to organismic biology worked out by Francisco Varela and his associates during the 1970s
"By the end of World War II, the early Cold War, and the period of the sociopolitical triumph of advanced capitalism and technocracy in the USA, classical Analytic philosophy had triumphed in a social-institutional sense; organicist philosophy had virtually disappeared except in a vestigial form, as an aspect of American pragmatism;"
(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/865/1597)