In this chapter we intend to demonstrate the importance of metaphysical idealism to contemporary science. The point of this chapter is not that the scientists we discuss are unusual in their adoption of an idealist metaphysics. On the contrary, our point is that, far from being antithetical to scientific thinking and discovery, philosophical idealism is essential to science.

In the opening chapters we saw ancient idealism emerge in response to the identity of thought and being set out by Parmenides. We set out the possibility of a “one-world” interpretation of Plato's Ideas in which the Idea is understood in terms of causality (rather than mimesis): a final, rather than efficient, causality, of course. We saw a Plato for whom there are many such genetic Ideas, which are in complex and hierarchical participation with one another: Ideas that emerge through reciprocal relations of difference (negation). We saw a Neoplatonic tradition emerging through the further systema-tization of this picture, together with the development of an asymmetrical ontology of genetic powers: the Idea manifested in actuality through the medium of difference in powers. Arguably, we shall find all these ingredients in the account of idealist science that follows. We shall find the Idea (as final cause) manifest most strongly in the concept of “organization” (as well as “system”, and “function”). We shall find the development of an ontology of difference, of asymmetrical powers, in the “far-from-equilibrium” conceptual apparatus. We shall find the interrogation of the identity of thought and being in the elaboration of the concepts of “cognition”(including subordinate concepts such as “measurement”, “recording” and “semantics”).