Organicism

Organicism is the view that living organisms have organized properties not adequately explained by treating them as mere aggregates. It emphasizes the organization and relations among parts in understanding life.

Emergence: Emergence is the appearance of system-level properties that are not present in individual components considered alone. Organismic properties are often treated as emergent effects of organized interactions.
Aristotle's biology: Aristotle's biology is his systematic study of living beings, their parts, development, and characteristic activities. His account of organisms as organized beings is an early source for organicist thought.
Kurt Goldstein: Kurt Goldstein was a neurologist whose holistic approach studied organisms as integrated beings adapting to their environments. His organismic theory applied whole-organism analysis to behavior and clinical neurology.
Developmental biology: Developmental biology studies how organisms grow and acquire form and function over their life cycles. Development depends on interactions among cells, tissues, and the developing organism.
Reductionism: Reductionism explains complex phenomena by analyzing them in terms of simpler components or processes. Organicism resists the claim that component-level accounts alone explain living organization.
Self-organization: Self-organization is the spontaneous formation of ordered patterns through local interactions within a system. It offers a way to explain organized living patterns without a central organizer.
Vitalism: Vitalism is the doctrine that living processes depend on a distinctive life principle absent from nonliving matter. Organicism shares resistance to simple reduction but need not posit a separate vital force.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy: Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist who developed general systems theory and theoretical biology. He argued that living systems require principles beyond the analysis of isolated parts.
Ecology: Ecology studies relationships among organisms and between organisms and their environments. Organismic thinking extends attention from internal organization to organism-environment relations.
Physicalism: Physicalism is the view that everything is physical or depends on the physical. Organicism can affirm physical dependence while disputing that aggregate-level analysis is sufficient.

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