Systemism

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A philosophical view holding that the world is made up of interacting systems, so that wholes should be understood through their interrelated parts rather than in isolation
2. The doctrine that complex things are best explained by studying the organized networks of components and relationships that make them up
3. A school of thought, associated with Mario Bunge, that treats every object of study as a system whose properties arise from its structure and connections

Etymology: "Systemism" is a plain formation: the noun "system" with the suffix "-ism", which in English turns a noun into a name for a doctrine, theory or system of thought. Adding "-ism" to a word is one of the most productive ways English names a body of ideas, so "systemism" follows the same pattern as "mechanism" or "naturalism" in building a label for a theory. The base word "system" has a long path of its own. It comes from Late Latin "systema", borrowed from Greek "sustēma", meaning a whole put together from parts, from "sunistanai" to bring together. Through that origin the word carries the sense of parts arranged into an organised whole, and that sense is what "systemism" inherits when it names an approach that treats phenomena as interconnected wholes rather than isolated pieces.