A Study On The Philosophical Thought Of Capra’s Systems View Of Life

After the initial negative deconstruction of postmodernism,the philosophical community of science suffered to some extent from nihilism and cultural despair,but on a positive note,this deconstruction broke with traditional epistemological and cultural norms,allowing humanity to view the real world from a new cognitive height.Capra locates this new cognitive height in the paradigm shift of social cognition,interpreting the crisis of modernity,which combines multiple crises of ecology,society,science and religious beliefs,as a display of the different facets of a cognitive crisis.The combination of a practical philosophical perspective and Kuhn’s scientific paradigm allows for the integration of value systems into the framework of a ’first philosophy’.By extending Kuhn’s scientific paradigm to the social paradigm,the systemic view of life provides a viable theoretical construct for a society-wide shift in worldview from the old mechanistic paradigm to a broad ecological paradigm.This paper follows Capra’s thesis that the crisis of modernity is a crisis of cognition and contributes to a paradigm shift in the cognitive world through the interpretation of important categories under the new paradigm.Based on the broad ecological paradigm,which takes "living systems" as its main object of study,the systems view of life divides living systems into four dimensions: biological,cognitive,social and ecological.The main body of the article will be divided into four parts,which will discuss the concept of "life" in the biological dimension,the concept of "cognition" in the cognitive dimension,the concept of "meaning" in the social dimension and the concept of "ecology" in the ecological dimension.The concept of "ecology" is interpreted in a broad ecological paradigm.The interpretation of the four dimensions will be based on three perspectives: organisational patterns,material structures and processes.In view of the difficulties of cognitive translation of concepts in different paradigms and the fact that the social paradigm as extended by Capra has not yet been tested by time,the biological and cognitive dimensions,which are still under Kuhn’s scientific paradigm,are included in the "main elements of a systemic view of life in the scientific paradigm",while the social and ecological dimensions,which are clearly beyond the scope of the scientific paradigm,are included in the "social paradigm".The social and ecological dimensions,which are clearly beyond the scope of the scientific paradigm,are included in the "main elements of a systems view of life in the social paradigm" to be discussed separately.These two sections form the bulk of the article.In addition to the difference in paradigm scope,a fundamental difference between these two sections is that while the scientific paradigm is based on the three perspectives mentioned above,the social paradigm has emerged from the perspective of ’meaning’ due to the complexity of human cognitive abilities.The emergence of "meaning" expands the two-dimensional cognitive model formed by the previous three perspectives into a three-dimensional model formed by the four perspectives,and the extra space derives from the socio-cultural environment shaped by the human inner world,making the discussion under the social paradigm qualitatively different from the previous one.This paper finds,in the context of Gadamer’s practical philosophy,that the new paradigm held by the systems view of life has the potential to unify the frontiers of science and technology with the value systems of the human sensual world.The paper will thus complete the philosophical analysis of the idea of the systems view of life.