Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)

Author(s):  
Elke Weik

Born in Leipzig in 1646, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is an influential figure in the world of process philosophy. In addition to his philosophical contributions, Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus and binary numbers, along with mathematical and logical forms of notation still used today. Leibniz believed that the worlds of theory, praxis, nature, morals, and the divine as well as the human world all formed one perfect system. This chapter examines Leibniz’s philosophy in relation to process metaphysics and its relevance to organization studies. It also discusses his responses to René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza concerning various issues, such as why he called the monads substances. It also considers which organization studies authors use Leibniz today.

This book examines process philosophy in organization studies by focusing on the life and work of a specific philosopher such as Jacques Derrida, Zhuang Zi, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Wilhelm Dilthey, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Gabriel Tarde, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson. It looks at process from five different aspects—temporality, wholeness, openness and the open self, force, and potentiality—that all touch on emerging concerns in organization studies. Each chapter considers how a philosopher’s work could potentially be useful for thinking processually in organization and management studies. Viewing process philosophy as a way of thinking rather than as a specific theory to be used, the book explores how philosophers might make us see things anew. For example, it discusses Daodejing, a compilation of sayings by Laozi, as well as Heraclitus’ philosophy and its inspirations for process thinking in organization studies. In addition, it analyzes the link between process and reality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 205979911774578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Pallesen

Currently, there is a growing field in organization studies, reflecting a stream in social science more broadly, which seeks to encompass a process philosophical view of the world as multiple and in constant becoming. However, this raises new questions and challenges to the field of methodology: If movement and process are the basic forms of the universe, then the vagueness and multiplicity that come with the flux of the world are not to be ruled out by rigorous research designs; rather, relating to vagueness and multiplicity may be the very precondition of approaching the studied phenomena. For some scholars, this has been an occasion for deeming the discipline of methodology ‘dead’ or ‘emptied’. In contrast to such claims, this article argues that the scholar doing empirical research from approaches drawing on process philosophy to no less extent than other scholars must deal with problems of methodological character. However, he or she may need a renewed understanding of traditional methodological categories such as documentation, validity and variation. Rather than cancelling such concepts, this article experimentally reconsiders them in a process view, using a piece of observational material to think from. The article suggests that process philosophy may open up a methodological thinking that has room for a more connotative, playful way of relating to research material – which does not demand from a method to overcome the gap between what is there and what is captured but makes use of this gap as a space of invitation and play. Rather than adhering to the promise of ruling out vagueness and filling out a gap, the article, therefore, in itself aims at being such an invitation for a connotative, playful methodology.


Author(s):  
Daniel Hjorth ◽  
Robin Holt

Baruch Spinoza is rarely read in organization studies and figures in discussions on process philosophy or process thinking only occasionally. However, he becomes a most apposite thinker of organization and process in the context of ethics. Spinoza’s philosophy emphasizes both agency and structure as the active or passive modulation of nature, rather than individual agents in their status as subjects, or on structures as determining constraints. This chapter examines Spinoza’s philosophy based on three basic concepts: substance, mode, and attribute. It also discusses his ideas about God, Nature, ethics of coping, conatus, affect and affective capacity, actorship, and organization.


2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062110317
Author(s):  
Piera Morlacchi

This article seeks to open up new possibilities for process organization studies to reimagine power and performativity by exploring the potential of Mary Parker Follett’s pragmatism as process philosophy. I revisit her body of work to show how she translated her process ontology into theoretical resources and practical insights that allow for new ways of understanding power and performativity together and explore them as mutually constituting processes of organizing. In particular, I mobilize Follett’s view of conflicts as emerging differences in the world and frictions as constructive conflicts with the potential to generate something new in order to introduce and conceptualize ‘performative power’, that is, the power emerging from relating and integrating differences in organizational situations that are experienced as frictions by people involved. Drawing on my ethnographic study of an entrepreneurship accelerator – a training programme for innovators and start-up projects – I discuss and illustrate empirically how performative power is generated from frictions that arise in ordinary lived experiences. This conceptualization of performative power is an attempt to develop a processual and performative understanding of power, and a useful lens to conduct process research. Making a connection between performative power and the experience of frictions provides a new way to see, talk and study processually power in contemporary organizations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772095444
Author(s):  
François Cooren

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.


Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianna Fotaki ◽  
Kate Kenny ◽  
Sheena J. Vachhani

Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the ‘pulsing refrains of affect’ that accompany our lived experiences.


Author(s):  
Abbas Mohammadi

Cinema consists of two different dimensions of art and instrument. A tool that mixes with art and represents society in which anything can be depicted for others. But art has always sought to portray the beauties of this universe. The beauty that lies within philosophy. Since the advent of human beings, men have always sought to dominate and abuse women for their own benefit. In the 19th century, cinema entered the realm of existence and found its place in the human world. With the empowerment of cinema in the world, filmmakers tried to achieve their goals by using this tool.Many filmmakers use women as a propaganda tool to attract a male audience. In many films, when the hero of a movie succeeds in reaching a woman, or in doing so, she is succeeded by a woman. In this way, of course, women themselves are not faultless and have helped men abuse women. Afghanistan, a traditional and male-dominated country, has not been the exception, and in many Afghan films women have been instrumental zed and used in various ways to benefit men, and we have seen fewer films in which women be a movie hero or a woman in a movie like a man. This kind of treatment of women in Afghan films has caused other young Afghan girls to not have a positive view of Afghan cinema.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-101
Author(s):  
Marina V. Pimenova ◽  
◽  
Aigul A. Bakirova ◽  

The article analyzes the cognitive signs of the macroconcept universe in Russian linguoculture. The relevance of the research is determined by the prospect of studying a new type of mental structures - symbolic macroconcepts. The purpose of the article is to describe the specifics of the macroconcept universe structure formation from the standpoint of the definition of syncretic primordial signs. The main methods in the work are the historical and etymological analysis of the studied macroconcept representative, descriptive and interpretive methods. During the study, seven motivating signs of the macroconcept universe were noted: 'earth', 'live', ‘world’,‘inhabit’,‘inhabited’,‘settlement’,‘light’. All identified motivating signs are syncretic symbolic primordial signs 'house' (conceptum, according to V. V. Kolesov). Motivating signs express two main symbolic meanings of Russian linguoculture: home is a place where people live, settle; home is the world of people and all living beings, this world-light (unlike that world-light where the souls of the dead go: that world-light is located in the sky), it is built on earth. The macroconcept universe is objectified by erased metaphors of a closed space (in particular, the metaphor of a key), which has an internal volume, center-middle, limits, parts, edges, corners, people live in this house, they live and exist in it, it is inhabited and settle down in Russian linguoculture. The model of the universe in the Russian language picture of the world is three-parted: the middle part in it represents the human world, in which the principle of anthropocentrism is manifested - a person measures space and chooses himself as a reference point. The syncretic primary sign ‘house’ unites in itself all the motivating signs of the studied macroconcept, keeping their relevance to our days. Keywords: macroconcept, motivating signs, first sign, language picture of the world, linguoculture, comparative studies


Author(s):  
Nataliya Alekseevna Zavyalova

The analysis of civilizational pictures of the world through the prism of linguistic universals allows one to reveal the general and the particular in the «human — world» system, which contributes to a more complete understanding of their cultural semantics. Cultural standards vary across civilizations. Their description on the material of multi-structural, genetically heterogeneous languages, civilizations and cultures makes it possible to reveal the common foundations of people's social life despite the fact that their cultural codes are different, often creating the impression of a complete incompatibility of the thinking and behavior of their representatives. Therefore, studies based on the description of fundamentally dissimilar civilizations and cultures, demonstrating the groundlessness of such impressions, are relevant. The article examines cultural and communicative formulae as a reflection of the civilizational pictures of the world. Cultural and communicative formulae (CCF) are defined by the author as the simplest, stable, high-frequency units of culture used at all levels of social and cultural life, which, being a combination of signs, compactly represent the culture in its similarity and difference with other cultures and make it possible to establish a dialogue of cultures in minimum of data involved. CCF provide communication through verbal forms of language, gestures, styles, etc., i.e. through all cultural forms that can be translated into signs of a given culture and are sufficient to have a minimal idea of it. The article examines the CCF using the example of concise verbal forms belonging to folk speech, which include proverbs and sayings, «winged words», precedent phrases that are a component of the civilizational picture of the world. The materials of the article may be of interest for preparation at the higher educational institution in the framework of the fields of «Linguistics», «International relations» and «Culturology».


Sociologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92
Author(s):  
Guido Sprenger

The term “animism” is at once a fantasy internal to modernity and a semiotic conduit enabling a serious inquiry into non-modern phenomena that radically call into question the modern distinction of nature and culture. Therefore, I suggest that the labelling of people, practices or ideas as “animist” is a strategic one. I also raise the question if animism can help to solve the modern ecological crisis that allegedly stems from the nature-culture divide. In particular, animism makes it possible to recognize personhood in non-humans, thus creating moral relationships with the non-human world. A number of scholars and activists identify animism as respect for all living beings and as intimate relationships with nature and its spirits. However, this argument still presupposes the fixity of the ontological status of beings as alive or persons. A different view of animism highlights concepts of fluid and unstable persons that emerge from ongoing communicative processes. I argue that the kind of attentiveness that drives fluid personhood may be supportive of a politics of life that sees relationships with non-humans in terms of moral commitment.


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