ABSTRACT
In this chapter we address some of the most difficult accounts of complexity, so far as philosophers and sociologists are concerned, since they derive from various interfaces between physics, chemistry and maths. These disciplines benefit, and suffer, from an immense degree of independent specialisation and so at least part of the problem is the disentangling of important themes ‘for us’ from the specific history of dispute and emergence within these sciences. Here we shall use the work of Ilya Prigogine, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems. This field massively overlaps, intervenes in and creates new relationships between physics, chemistry and biology. Prigogine, suggests that it is crucial for all systems involving evolution, whether, for example, of chemical processes, living organisms or societies. This challenge has been taken up by a number of authors important to our field, notably Reed and Harvey, Urry, Hayles, Byrne, Porush, Eve et al., Douglas Keil and Elliott. For our purposes, Prigogine’s significance lies precisely in thermodynamics, that is, in an ontology grounded in the actions of energy, whose products include human organisations. As such, it provides a key opposition to the ontologies associated with humanism. Another powerful source, this time informed by biology and maths, is Cohen and Stewart (1995), to whom we shall return later in this chapter.
