Rolf Sattler

Sattler was born in Göppingen, Germany. He studied botany, zoology, chemistry, philosophy and pedagogy in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and received his doctorate, with summa cum laude, in systematic botany from the University of Munich. As a postdoctoral fellow, he spent a year with Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of general systems theory, at the University of Alberta in Canada. Subsequently, he worked for another year with Ernest M. Gifford and G. Ledyard Stebbins at the University of California. For 33 years, he was first assistant, then associate, and finally full professor in the departments of botany and biology of McGill University in Montreal. He became Emeritus Professor when he retired in 1997. Since retiring he has lived in Kingston, Ontario.

In 1995, he gave a talk on science and spirituality in a symposium at the 60th birthday celebrations of the Dalai Lama. There he discussed the relation between science and spirituality with special reference to life science.

In 1995 he received an honorary doctorate (D.Sc.) from the Open International University at Colombo, Sri Lanka for his contributions to complementary alternative medicine.

Besides Biophilosophy (1986), his philosophical contributions include articles on complementarity (perspectivism), process philosophy, the mandala principle, and the convergence of science and spirituality. Additional publications deal with holistic alternative medicine and healing ways of thinking such as fuzzy logic, Yin-Yang thinking (both/and logic), Buddhist and Jain logic.

Sattler is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1974 he was awarded the Lawson Medal (the highest award of the Canadian Botanical Association) for his book Organogenesis of Flowers.

Rolf Sattler FLS FRSC (born March 8, 1936) is a Canadian plant morphologist, biologist, philosopher, and educator. He is considered one of the most significant contributors to the field of plant morphology and "one of the foremost plant morphologists in the world." His contributions are not only empirical but involved also a revision of the most fundamental concepts, theories, and philosophical assumptions. He published the award-winning Organogenesis of Flowers (1973) and nearly a hundred scientific papers, mainly on plant morphology. As well he has contributed to many national and international symposia and also organized and chaired symposia at international congresses, edited the proceedings of two of them and published them as books.