ABSTRACT
Although the philosopher and biologist L. von Bertalanffy is rightly considered the main founder of “general system theory,” a project he formulated for the first time in 1937, his contributions to this project are still not well enough known. It is true that his reflections often remained in a state of outline, imprecise, and scattered. Confusions also arose from the names he gave to his project, and he himself was not satisfied with this. It is neither a philosophical doctrine nor a scientific theory, but instead aimed at becoming a philosophically founded and scientifically fertile system for the interpretation of “reality,” able to guide action according to specific values. Inspired by expressions used in 1973 by R. L. Ackoff and J. Kamary ` t, I chose to call it the “systemological hermeneutics,” or (with M. Drack) “general systemology.” 1 The justification for those designations will appear in the present paper, which I have organized around a more sophisticated scheme than the rather crude classification constructed by Bertalanffy himself, 2 the “hermeneutical system of general systemology”:
