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This paper has three parts. First, I discuss what I take as the original stimulus and the purpose of general systems theory (GST) to be, why I think it is important, and how I came to be involved in it. I reflect on von Bertalanffy's general system (sic) theory and the early debates on the topic, stressing the essential concept of isomorphism, with its rewards in following up parallel developments in different domains, and its risks and temptations in the projection of grand and all‐inclusive systems. Second, I discuss the direction my own work took after my term as President of the Society for General Systems Research (1966–1967), and how it diverged from the early program, in particular in its emphasis on the difference between system and structure and on the essential role of individual subjectivity in the latter. I stress the importance of the concept of 'relation' as underlying that of 'system', and in particular the difference between relations as embodied in physical systems and relations as components of intentional structures that may or may not correspond to physical systems. In the third and final part, I discuss the place of GST in the philosophy of science, especially in connection with the unity of science movement, and its potential for the organization of this domain. I ask what light the concept of system can throw on our knowledge of the universe and its worlds (a distinction explained in the paper), and what the risks are of assuming tight isomorphisms between mathematical structures and physical systems, for example, in cosmology and quantum mechanics. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Jean-Paul Sartre is the writer who gave the most trenchant formulation of existentialism and tried to do the same for a version of Marxism, and as a philosopher of history who got it wrong about history and then, in his last "philosophical manifesto" - volume III of the Idiot (English version volume V) - got it brilliantly right. But Sartre did not write the second volume of the Critique. Or, more exactly, he wrote it but he did not publish it. The Critique, as Sartre himself admitted, grew like a hernia on the body of the book on Flaubert, so that it had to be surgically removed and given a life of its own; but a sort of symbiosis persisted, and when it came to the continuation of the argument, Sartre seems to have sensed that volume II was a dead end, and that the route to the alternative would prove to lie after all in the Flaubert project itself. In order to understand Sartre's position, the author analyzes his conception of history, especially of the intelligibility of history by mean of the dialectical reason as a movement of totalization of practical seriality, and shows its actuality.

Jean-Paul Sartre is the writer who gave the most trenchant formulation of existentialism and tried to do the same for a version of Marxism, and as a philosopher of history who got it wrong about history and then, in his last "philosophical manifesto" - volume III of the Idiot (English version volume V) - got it brilliantly right. But Sartre did not write the second volume of the Critique. Or, more exactly, he wrote it but he did not publish it. The Critique, as Sartre himself admitted, grew like a hernia on the body of the book on Flaubert, so that it had to be surgically removed and given a life of its own; but a sort of symbiosis persisted, and when it came to the continuation of the argument, Sartre seems to have sensed that volume II was a dead end, and that the route to the alternative would prove to lie after all in the Flaubert project itself. In order to understand Sartre's position, the author analyzes his conception of history, especially of the intelligibility of history by mean of the dialectical reason as a movement of totalization of practical seriality, and shows its actuality.

This paper offers an interpretation of the concept of social structure in the context of a theory of models, construed as mental structures, conscious or unconscious. Operational and representational models are attributed to members of the society studied, explanatory models to the anthropologists studying them. The social structure is found to have an objective reality but at the same time to be dependent on the existence of the models. And in this it seems to exhibit a general property of objects of the social sciences.