I strongly disagree with your first thesis, that the cosmology of ancient Greece was static. They were constantly under various military threats as they weren’t even one united country. Medicine was primitive and so health unpredictable, as was the weather, as was everything else. That is why oracles were so important. Their world was definitely simpler than ours, but they also had a much more limited ability to understand how it works. That’s why the gods were so important: to fill that void. Do look up my article on the constancy of the human predicament: as our technology increased, so did the complexity of our world, leaving us where we started, looking up to our present day gurus just like the ancient Greeks were looking to their prophets(https://lnedelescu.wordpress.com/2012/10/27/manifesto-against-the-5-steps-to-topic-of-your-choice-recipe-to-success/).

Your second thesis lumps all Greek philosophers into the reductionist camp. I strongly disagree that this works for even one philosopher at a time. Socrates’ dialectical method is strongly aligned with holistic thinking, because it basically supports the whole as bigger than the parts paradigm (thesis and antithesis transcend into a superior argument to each through synthesis). This same paradigm is described in Roger Martinn’s integrative thinking.

I agree with Peter Drucker being associated with holistic philosophy. His “doing things right vs. doing the right thing” is clearly opposed to a reductionist view of the world. It is also equivalent to Roger Martin’s “reliability vs. validity” or to Russell Ackoff’s “efficiency vs. effectiveness”. Rusell Ackoff by the way provides the best account I’ve seen of the world evolving from mechanistic to social systemic thinking (http://acasa.upenn.edu/socsysthnkg.pdf).

In the interest in keeping the reply short I won’t go here into Roger Martin’s integrative thinking, but I have personally experienced it before reading about it, which makes me one believer. It is also aligned with the evolutionary concept of irreducible complexity, which is one of the strongest arguments to date in favor of a holistic view of life.

Finally, from my observations which I’ve developed into models that I subsequently validated in practice, the more sophisticated the mental model through which one views reality, the more effective his or her actions and the broader their impact. I would suggest you look up Elliot Jaques for additional proof of mind over action.

There is also the possibility that we are in agreement and I interpret your statement too simplistically.

Peter Drucker did not agree with Descartes’ view of history and he did not think that the tensions and dilemmas that are endemic to management are dialectical. That is, he did not see them capable of being resolved into a synthesis at a higher level. That would be too static a resolution. Rather he saw them as polarities, like the poles of a magnet that existed at all levels. The dialogue between continuity and change was never-ending and there was no static resolution.

A similar tension exists between thinking and acting, with the Greeks and the Enlightenment philosopher privileging former over latter. I really like Roger Martin’s writing, especially Fixing the Game, but I felt that The Opposable Mind was far too abstract and cerebral in its biases. You can read my review of the book that I wrote for Strategy+Business here:

http://www.davidkhurst.com/book_reviews/the-opposable-mind-how-successful-leaders-win-through-integrative-thinking/

I cite John Dewey’s comment that “No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another.” Basically I argue that practice still trumps theory and that one cannot privilege one over the other. I think that we need to embrace and contain logical Cartesian thinking in an evolutionary/ecological framework. Drucker described himself late in his career as a “social ecologist” and I believe that social ecology – the understanding of humankind in context – points the way ahead to a dynamic reunion of what T.S. Eliot called “the fire and the rose”, action and contemplation.