Boston, MA – Philip Kretsedemas, a respected public intellectual, researcher, and policy analyst, has launched a new personal website coming soon at www.philipkretsedemas.com. The content of the website aims to chart new pathways in the philosophy of science, social science methodology that take an integrative approach toward matters of the heart and the mind.
In the About Me page for his new website, Phil notes that, “The modern world is powered by abstract systems of knowledge that are disconnected from the particulars of our lives. It has been very successful in helping us achieve a level of material wealth that is unparalleled in human history. But it’s also created a situation in which millions upon millions of people can be ‘very well off’ by most objective standards, and also feel incredibly disconnected from each other and anxious about what the future holds.The experiments in soul-searching that populate this website are my humble attempt at providing a more humane alternative to this schizoid reality.”
All of the website’s contents touch on the relationship between self-care and our capacity for social observation and scientific analysis. Phil sums up this relationship in the following way: “If we are not at peace and clear-headed within ourselves, we’re not going to be able to make coherent sense of all the stimuli that bombard us on a daily basis … The perspective I’ve just shared was a widely understood commonsense among the intellectual classes of the ancient world. But it’s been diminished by the modern paradigm of science. Scientific investigation, from the early-modern period onward, has become largely focused on knowledge derived from observations of the natural world, and this shift has been accompanied by a diminished concern for the interior life of the observer.”
Phil builds on these kinds of observations to make a case for the revaluation of ascetic practice and other regimens of self-discipline and critical introspection as essential for social science practitioners. Phil notes that these practices have been called “the first science” for good reason, and insists that the social science community needs to rediscover the power of the first science if it’s going to face up to the ethical challenges posed by the social consequences of the revolution in Artificial Intelligence, advances in biogenomic technology, the inter-related and escalating crises of climate change and global displacement, and many other issues besides.
We have no shortage of great minds and technological solutions that have radically enhanced our ability to transform our social and physical world. On the other hand our capacity for ethical and moral reasoning (which includes our ability to integrate ethical and moral reasoning into our scientific methods, in ways that are relevant to human needs) needs to catch up to all of this technological progress.
Phil’s new website provides a space for people who are interested in thinking through these issues. For the time being the website will be organized around a series of blog posts, but Phil is looking forward to creating more interactive spaces (both synchronous and asynchronous).
The website will feature a roster of four separate blog pages that will be launched over the next two months.
The first blog page will be devoted entirely to the first science. This page will feature meditations on ascetic practice (some of which will be directly relevant to social science research and others entirely devoted to self-care).
Another page will be devoted to exploring new directions in social science theory and methodology that could either benefit from or are already informed by a more integrated approach toward scientific analysis and self-care. This page will also feature posts that comment on the ethical implications on new developments in both the “hard” and “soft” sciences, as well as essays that explain how spirituality can be (and already has been) integrated into social science research and theory, as a viable epistemological perspective on social processes.
The other two blog pages will explore these same issues through meditations on the problem of extreme violence (including terrorism and other kinds of mass-killings) and new directions in security studies (organized around the concept of cultural security).
These last two pages feature content that draws on Phil’s established areas of expertise on the subjects of immigration enforcement, immigration and refugee law and policy, race and ethnic studies and gender studies (among others); but also builds out this expertise to address new questions that have been more directly informed by Phil’s classroom teaching over the past twenty years (as well as his personal observations on the state of the social science profession).
Phil’s commitment to interrogating the moral and ethical black hole of extreme violence is directly informed by his experience teaching a class on the problem of violence at Boston’s only public university during the time of the Boston Marathon bombing. Phil was transformed by what he learned from his students that semester as they processed what had happened, and especially after learning, only days after the attacks, that one of the bombing victims had been a fellow student who had taken a class that Phil had taught a few years later.
This was a pivotal experience for Phil which lead him to focus most of his university teaching on the problem of violence and anti-terrorism for the next nine years (until he transitioned from academia). But it was not an isolated incident by any means. Phil had been grappling with the problem of extreme violence for two decades prior to the Marathon bombings through his field research on the contemporary and historical experience of the US black community.
The problem of extreme violence is the pivotal issue that led Phil to begin questioning the ethical, moral and epistemological foundations of the social sciences. But it also bears noting that the interrogation of violence is just one of the many concerns that Phil will be using to guide his revaluation of social science inquiry, as channeled through the lens of the first science.
Philip Kretsedemas has over two decades of experience in both the academic and nonprofit sectors. His books and research articles have been published by venues such as The American Quarterly, Stanford Law and Policy Review, Columbia University Press, Routledge Press and Temple University Press.
To read more, visit the website here coming soon: www.philipkretsedemas.com
Contact: philipkretsedemas@emaildn.com
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