BCSSS Board Members give lectures at a University of León course on systems. See more here.

The Bertalanffy Center is in the position to offer a scholarship for PhD students enrolled in a doctoral programme at an Austrian university. The thematic orientation can belong to any academic field, as long as it promises to yield or promote new findings in systems science. Any systems approach may be taken. Transdisciplinarity and/or focus on global challenges are highly welcome. The grantee will be employed by the Center. Candidates are free to submit their application until 31st of October 2013.

For more information read here.

Jennifer Wilby (photo: Jennifer Wilby)

Jennifer Wilby is the first female member of our Scientific Council (see here). She is a senior lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Programmes in the Business School at the University of Hull.  Jennifer is a Fellow of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Systems (IASCYS), President of the United Kingdom Systems Society (UKSS) 2013-15, and President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) in 2010/11. Jennifer has been working in the role of Vice President of Administration for ISSS since the end of the 1990s, and has been an editor and member of editorial boards for several ISSS and systems publications in that same time. In 1995, a paper on working within a framework for using multiple methodologies won the Vickers Award for Best student paper.

Her work over the past 20 years has been driven by the need to provide space on a regular basis for the people who work with General System Theory and to preserve both the legacy of the original Society for General Systems Research and its current investigations and contributions and future promise for our complex world.

“As President of ISSS,” she says, “I was heavility influenced in the design of that conference by my past experiences in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary modes of research and practice. This research is centred on the body of knowledge core to the Bertalanffy Centre and General Systems Theory.” In the 2011 conference, the theme “All Together Now – Working Across Disciplines: People, Principles and Practice” was chosen to focus a collective exploration of these core principles of GST and transdisciplinary working.

The following words describe the mission of her engagement: “The continued quest for successful holistic applications highlights the necessity to work across disciplines and to unite the different systemic schools and disciplines and to develop the people skills and capabilities for doing so.”

David Pouvreau (see here), author of “The Dialectical Tragedy of the Concept of Wholeness”, volume 1 of our book series “Exploring Unity Through Diversity”, finished his dissertation with the title: “A history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s ‘general systemology’ – Genealogy, genesis, actualization and posterity of a hermeneutical project”. His thesis received the highest distinction at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. It comprises more than 1.000 pages. (Follow that link.)

David Pouvreau (photo: David Pouvreau)

Vladimir I. Vernadsky is the Russian founder of Biogeochemistry. He died in 1945. On the occasion of his 150th birthday several scientific institutions met at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin for a conference on 15th March 2013 (at the same building Vernadsky held two lectures in 1927).

Wolfgang Hofkirchner compared Vernadsky’s concepts of the Geosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere to Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s ground-breaking idea of bridging the then-breach between mechanicists and vitalists in biology by establishing a systems approach. Vernadsky’s concepts prove to be implicitly system theoretical and share the same logic, in particular, as to the basic assumption of a hierarchy of levels (click here for the presentation slides).

Prof. Dr. Heinz Kautzleben, Sekretar der Klasse Naturwissenschaften, Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, holds his lecture (photo: Wolfgang Hofkirchner)

For more information see Hofkirchner’s blog here.