Lectures / 01/06/2009 7:30 pm

Why do we always take it for granted that there must be an agent? The philosophical concept of “self-organisation”, illustrated with examples drawn from science, crime novels and lyrical poetry

“Who has done that?” That is a standard question both for children and grown-ups. Surely here must be some kind of agent. The answers usually given bear a certain resemblance to each other despite the different contexts in which they originate, be it in creation myths, medieval romances or modern science: God, the hero, the system – we’re always looking for agents, sometimes for extremely elusive ones, such as Osama Bin Laden. But do we really need agents in order to understand the world? In providing an answer to this question Simon Reitze compares different forms of self-organisation in his quest for alternative methods in the generation of meaning.