Be your enemy

Abstract

C. West Churchman was a very personal writer who wrote from his own existential concerns in an authentic and original way. We get to know him even if we never meet him personally because of the almost autobiographical nature of his work In The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), Churchman probed how we seek knowledge either as individuals or as groups. He was trying to determine how we think and know. In particular, he was trying to figure out how he could make himself into a good inquiring system. For these purposes, he investigated the thought of Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, George Hegel and Edgar Singer. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.