Vincenzo De De Florio

In this article I interpret resilience and evolution in view of the philosophy of Leibniz. First, I discuss resilience as a substance’s or a monad’s “quantity of essence” — its “degree of perfection” — which I express as the quality of the Whole with respect to the sum of the qualities of the Parts. Then I discuss evolution, which I interpret here as the autopoietic Principle that sets Itself in motion and creates all reality, including Itself. This Principle may be considered as a sort of ante-litteram metaphysical Darwinian Selection. My interpretations provide a different formulation for questions such as “why natural evolution evolves?” and “why is this the best of all possible worlds?” In this article I also provide a geometrical interpretation of a key aspect behind the “divine mathematics” of the autopoietic Principle.

The term gestalt, when used in the context of general systems theory, assumes the value of “systemic touchstone”, namely a figure of reference useful to categorize the properties or qualities of a set of systems. Typical gestalts used, e.g., in biology, are those based on anatomical or physiological characteristics, which correspond respectively to architectural and organizational design choices in natural and artificial systems. In this paper we discuss three gestalts of general systems theory: behavior, organization, and substance, which refer respectively to the works of Wiener, Boulding, and Leibniz. Our major focus here is the system introduced by the latter. Through a discussion of some of the elements of the Leibnitian System, and by means of several novel interpretations of those elements in terms of today’s computer science, we highlight the debt that contemporary research still has with this Giant among the giant scholars of the past.