Cultures of Rationality: Integral Politics in a Nonpolar World
- Integral Theory
- Economic Theories of De-growth
- Antifragility
- Nonpolarity
- Decision Making and Policy Development
BIO:
David Dusseault, (PhD / MA University of Helsinki) is a political scientist by training and a policy analyst by trade. David’s Master’s work focused on International Relations and normative theories of Democracy. Later on, his doctoral research homed in on elite risk assessments as keys to regime consolidation when applied to the political economy of Russia’s regions and federal institutions during the Yeltsin period (1992–2000).
Out of his PhD research grew an interest in various structures which define the hydrocarbon business, the drivers behind energy policy formation, and the practical knock-on effects produced by the energy trade. By 2011, David was hired as Senior Market Analyst for the Finnish natural gas distribution company Gasum OY. There, he covered structural changes in the energy trade related to making hydrocarbons greener, more sustainable and yet commercially profitable.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
As a member of the Cultures of Rationality research group here at SAS, David’s intellectual interests are now focused on the calculi of decision making under increasing systemic uncertainty. To contend with the topic, he is employing a generalized model of Integral Theory to global events. Through this novel approach the intention is to discern to what extent specific logics / codes / programs which underpin public expressions of individual, institutional and organizational interests can be qualified and applied to both research and real-world circumstances.
In a related probe, David is scrutinizing the concept of information as the trendy solution for the challenges facing policy makers. According to preliminary findings, information in and of itself is a commodity like any other; quality and quantity are necessary but hardly sufficient factors in determining its ultimate worth to the policy process in an increasingly uncertain world. The question he intends to tackle concerns descriptive and causal inference related to the influence of information at points of saturation and scarcity along trajectories of the policy formation process.
Finally, David is investigating the implications that may be drawn from a deeper structural examination of Nonpolarity (Haass 2008). In line with Taleb’s concept of Antifragility (2012), existing frames of reference (paradigms, concepts, & technology) used to navigate the contemporary world are designed more to provide insight into the problems of the past than to deal with the challenges posed by an uncertain future. Subsequently, relative uncertainty is a product of employing antiquated tools, to produce increasing amounts of data devoid of inference, in defense of the business as usual case, which is no longer business in content or usual in context.
- IT
- Computer Science
- Artificial intelligence
- Machine learning
- Physics — Quantum Mechanics
BIO:
Fabio Grazioso graduated in physics in Naples (Italy) at “Università degli studi di Napoli - Federico II”, with a thesis on nonlinear optics. He then worked as a research specialist in a spin-off company of the same University, on a project for experimental Quantum Cryptography, which involved Quantum Optics, IT and Electronics. In Oxford (England) he obtained his PhD (2011), with a thesis in Solid-State Physics and Quantum Optics.
He has been post-doctoral fellow at the École Normale Superiéure de Cachan, in Paris (France), where he worked on both Information Theory and experimental Quantum Cryptography. Then in Montreal (Canada), at Université de Montréal, in the Laboratoire d'Informatique Théorique et Quantique (Laboratory of Theoretical Information Science and Quantum Information Science) he worked with Gilles Brassard on Quantum Complexity Theory. He did a third postdoctoral internship in the Nonlinear Photonics Group, at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), leading a project on experimental Quantum Cryptography and Nonlinear Integrated Optics. At INRS he has also been involved in other projects related to Quantum Optics and Quantum Entanglement.
As the son of a high school Philosophy teacher he has always had a keen interest for this discipline, in particular Epistemology and its links with the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. Beside the academic career, Fabio has a long experience as a professional IT consultant, network administrator and web developer.
At SAS, Fabio will be teaching IT and other topics related to Computer Science. He will also do research in the group Cultures of Rationality.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Fabio’s past career has developed around the subject of Quantum Information Science, following an interdisciplinary path that goes from Theoretical and Experimental Quantum Optics and Solid State Physics, to Quantum Information Theory, Quantum Complexity Theory and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
The theme connecting all his career steps, since his undergraduate studies, is his interest in the concept of information content of a (quantum) physical system. This is well represented and discussed in his paper on Classical and Quantum Information Theory. At SAS he has joined the research group on Cultures of Rationality.
- History of ideas
- Platonism
- Epicureanism
- Political theory
- Liberalism
- Transhumanism
- Shakespeare
- Outsider intellectuals
- Cybernetics
- Integral theory
BIO:
In the late 1990s John Tangney worked as an education officer with the James Joyce Cultural Centre in Dublin, helping to develop an education program for high school students and university undergraduates. This work inspired him to go to Trinity College, Dublin, to study literature following which, in 2001/2002, he spent some time teaching English in Japan. He did his doctoral work in the English Department at Duke University between 2003 and 2009. The dissertation was called The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance and it dealt with the transvaluation of medieval values in early modernity, focussing particularly on writers from the 1590s and early 1600s including Shakespeare, Nashe, Spenser, and the Jacobean dramatists. After graduation John worked at NTU, Singapore, from 2009 to 2015, teaching courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, Classical Literature and the History of Literary Theory. While there he was a co-organiser of an international conference on ‘The Contemporary’ in 2011 and served as Graduate Studies Coordinator. In 2015, he returned to Ireland where he spent time doing a coding bootcamp, and was involved in the launch of a new cultural magazine based around rare and unusual books, called The Time Traveller. At SAS he is a member of the Cultures of Rationality research group, and teaches Great Books in the core curriculum, as well as the electives ‘Memories, Dreams, Confessions’: Writing the Inner Life and ‘An Imperial Affliction’: Depression in Literature. He also runs The Intellectual Diversity Podcast.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
John is interested in the History of Ideas, especially the afterlives of premodern ideas in modern culture. Kant observed in his first critique that the history of philosophy could be divided between Platonists and Epicureans. John has adapted this idea in essays on Yeats and Iris Murdoch, and on the films of Alex Proyas, trying to see how incommensurable worldviews are reconciled in the artistic imagination. This theme also informs his philosophical essay on Into Eternity, Michael Madsen’s documentary about nuclear waste, published in 2017 by Religion and the Arts. This work is connected to questions about the limits of liberalism as a paradigm within which to understand the different value systems that have to do business with each other in today’s world. John has discovered resources for thinking about this problem outside academe, in the integral theory of a 20th century Platonist like Jean Gebser and together with his research group is trying to see whether it’s possible to bring him into dialogue with the philosophies of matter and language that circumscribe the academic world. In other projects, John is writing a commissioned article on Death in Shakespeare, and researching the noon topos in literature and philosophy. Noon is a moment of materialist despair that can give way to an encounter with alterity that may be feminine, divine or alien. It links to questions of sexual difference, the soul and even artificial intelligence, helping him think about how the Epicurean founders of cybernetics have drawn on the resources of the Platonic tradition in their conceptualisation of thermodynamic processes and of autopoetic systems.
To this end we propose to bring two theoretical models into conversation. The first is Richard N Haass’s ‘non-polarity’ theory as introduced in a 2008 essay in Foreign Affairs. It proposes that in the era of globalization, the advent of new non-state actors with financial and opinion-making powers equivalent to those of nation-states has inaugurated a non-polar world where it is difficult to locate the direct lines of tension making up the world order. The second model is ‘integral theory’ as elaborated by Jean Gebser, Clare Graves, Ken Wilber and others. Integral theory is a developmental model that has identified a series of ‘structures of consciousness’ that dictate how individuals and societies experience the world. It differs from social constructivist theories currently popular in academe by recognizing that individuals can be more or less evolved than their communities, and that they can be forced to speak the values-language of a particular structure of consciousness from a personal position that is at odds with it. This allows one to develop ‘skillful means’ for dealing with individuals in politically fraught situations where interpreting their actions in terms of superficial cultural knowledge might be counterproductive.
Integral theory also allows us to recognise that in different communities where different structures of consciousness are dominant, rational decision-making looks very different. Therefore we have coined the term ‘cultures of rationality’ to describe professional, ethnic, national and other communities that have distinct assumptions and values that are often poorly understood by themselves or by the people they are in political communication with. Developing a complex vocabulary for describing these distinctions is imperative in a global scene where the terminology of left and right, or conservative and liberal, or secular and religious, is too blunt an instrument to cope with the shifting political landscape.
Our team comprises Ph.Ds in literature, physics, international relations and anthropology.
Integral theory is largely unknown within these fields. We believe it provides some of the needed concepts and vocabulary, and that by bringing it into conversation with our own academic fields we can contribute to a variety of interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and sciences.