„Biosystemizm” M. Mahnera i M. Bungego
“Biosystemism” of M. Mahner and M. Bunge

Summary/Abstract: In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was the heated discussion going on concerning a question: “what is life?” between the representatives of two opposing positions: “mechanism” and “vitalism”. The twentieth century adopted this dispute as a heritage of the past centuries. In the twentieth century many researchers, rejecting both mechanistic and vitalistic conception of life, proposed their own, alternative theory of life. Beside the theory of the „directness of life” that was proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century by J. S. Haldane and elaborated in the following years by L. von Bertalanffy in the system theory of an organism, the special attention should be paid to the “biosystemism” that was already introduced at the end of the twentieth century by M. Mahner and M. Bunge. According to the above-mentioned conception, bios is a new, emergent level, which is rooted in a chemical level. Living systems, despite the fact that they are created from physicochemical subsystems, have, as these two researchers claim, new emergent properties, which are not carried by their component parts.

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