Paul Cilliers

"The acknowledgement of complexity, however, certainly does not lead to the conclusion that anything goes."

"Paul Cilliers was a remarkable Renaissance man and one of the most important academics and Afrikaner intellectuals that this country has produced. I had the privilege of knowing him for close on thirt…"

"The idea of ‘slowness’ became an important mantra for Paul: he wrote a widely cited paper on this topic. One of the popular newspaper columns he wrote for Die Burger was a letter to John Stuart Mill i…"

"The view from complexity claims that we cannot know complex things completely... modest positions are inescapable... We can increase the knowledge we have of a certain system, but this knowledge is li…"

"There has to be a constant flow of energy to maintain the organization of the system and to ensure its survival. Equilibrium is another word for death."

"A certain theory of representation implies a certain theory of meaning - and meaning is what we live by."

"There is no over-arching theory of complexity that allows us to ignore the contingent aspects of complex systems. If something really is complex, it cannot by adequately described by means of a simple…"

"It bears repetition that an argument against representation is not anti-scientific at all. It is merely an argument against a particular scientific strategy that assumes complexity can be reduced to s…"