strong Zitate

Recently I asked three corporate executives what decisions they had made in the last year that they would not have made were it not for their corporate plans. All had difficulty in identifying one such decision. Since each of their plans were marked 'secret' or 'confidential', I asked them how their competitors might benefit from the possession of their plans. Each answered with embarrassment that

their competitors would not benefit. Yet these executives were strong advocates of corporate planning.

I began graduate work in the philosophy of sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 where I came under the influence of the grand old man” of the department, the eminent philosopher E. A. Singer, Jr. Because of the informality of the department he created I began to collaborate with two younger members of the faculty, both of whom were former students of Singer, Thomas A. Cown and C.

West Churchman.
Three aspects of Singer's philosophy had a particularly strong influence on me. First, that the practice of philosophy, its application, was necessary for the development of philosophy itself. Second, that effective work on real” problems required an interdisciplinary approach. Third, that the social area needed more work than any of the other domains of science and that this

was the most difficult.
We developed a concept of a research group that would enable us to practice philosophy in the social domain by dealing with real problems. The organization we designed was called The Institute of Experimental Method.”

It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment even in

slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably

no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind.

Meat is a cultural construct made to seem natural and inevitable. By the time the argument from analogy with carnivorous animals is made, the individual making such an argument has probably consumed animals since before the time she or he could talk. Rationalizations for consuming animals were probably offered when this individual at age four or five was discomforted upon discovering that meat

came from dead animals. The taste of dead flesh preceded the rationalizations, and offered a strong foundation for believing the rationalizations to be true.

If the Christian religion, as I understand it, or as you understand it, should maintain its ground, as I believe it will, yet Platonic, Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before

he expires.