Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy
Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa
Source: Holism and Evolution (1926), p. 342
Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist
Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 176
Context: Even these humble objects reveal that our reality is not a mere collocation of elemental facts, but consists of units in which no part exists by itself, where each part points beyond itself and implies a larger whole. Facts and significance cease to be two concepts belonging to different realms, since a fact is always a fact in an intrinsically coherent whole. We could solve no problem of organization by solving it for each point separately, one after the other; the solution had to come for the whole. Thus we see how the problem of significance is closely bound up with the problem of the relation between the whole and its parts. It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher
Source: 1920s, Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (1928, 1933), p. 305; as cited in: Cliff Hooker ed. (2011) Philosophy of Complex Systems. p. 189
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer
Fifth Dialogue
The Ash Wednesday Supper (1584)
Raymond Antrobus (1986)
On poetry in “Interview | Raymond Antrobus” https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/interview-poet-raymond-antrobus/ in the London Magazine (2019 Feb 20)
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"Fifty Years Hence", The Strand Magazine (December 1931).
The 1930s
“The whole is simpler than its parts.”
Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) physicist
Quoted by Irving Fisher in "The Applications of Mathematics to the Social Sciences," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 36, 225-243 (1930). Full article http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183493954 <br class="br">Attributed
John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician
The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)