Systems theory to social sciences (see David Easton's seminal development of the "political system" as an analytical construct), the original theorists explored the implications of twentieth century advances in terms of systems. People have studied subjects like complexity, self-organization, connectionism and adaptive systems in the 1940s and 1950s. In fields like cybernetics, researchers such as Norbert Wiener, William Ross Ashby, John von Neumann and Heinz von Foerster, examined complex systems mathematically. John von Neumann discovered cellular automata and self-reproducing systems, again with only pencil and paper. Aleksandr Lyapunov and Jules Henri Poincaré worked on the foundations of chaos theory without any computer
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature", published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the "Treatise", which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work. The end product of his labours was the "Enquiry". The "Enquiry" dispensed with much of