Praxiological Studies

Book excerpt: Noting in this connection that KotarbiIiski's assumptions were proved true many years later, and that increasingly representatives of various scientific disciplines have come to observe paradigms of efficiency which had often tended to be ignored; empirical studies involving a large concentration of personnel, financial resources and equipment are now guided by the principles of efficiency and economy. In his second paper Kotarbiriski referred to Alfred Espinas, the French philosopher and sociologist, and to other authors who repre sented the praxiological viewpoint, together with that of the general systems approach. KotarbiIiski was the first to accept a theory more general than praxiology, which he termed the theory of complexes. He considered one of its representatives to be A. Bogdanov (1873-1928), the Marxist theorist and author of Tectology. A General Theory of Organization (first written in Russian, published in the German language version as Allgemeine Organizationslehre in the 1920's, and recently translated into English in Canada). KotarbiIiski also realized that he was not the only praxiologist, that even the name of the dis cipline had been used earlier by various authors not aware of the work of others.