I’m happy to share the news (a little belatedly) that complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman will be leaving his position as director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics to take a position here with the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center, which, according to Grad College dean Dom Grasso, aims to become “the Santa Fe Institute of the East.” What form that may take is currently a little up for grabs, as UVM reconfigures its graduate offerings through a series of transdisciplinary research initiatives. But it’s a very safe bet that both environmental (including socio-environmental) research and complex systems research will continue to grow, and my hope is that Kauffman’s arrival may herald greater collaboration not only between those two broad fields but with humanists, philosophers, and cultural studies folks as well.
Kauffman’s books Reinventing the Sacred — see this video to get an idea of it — and At Home in the Universe both resonate well with the ideas explored on this blog (from Connolly’s immanent naturalism and Whitehead’s process thought to Deleuzian and Spinozan thought on nature and society), as I’ve posted about previously. I look forward to having him as a colleague.
Adrian, I can’t imagine a more interesting and exciting opportunity for you. A big mystery for me has been why Kauffman’s theoretical, but also even more, his philosophical exploration has stalled after such a promising beginning. (I found his Reinventing the Sacred to simply be a kind of re-expression of his initial observations and prospective thoughts so many years before.) This being said, Kauffman’s project and its philosophical ramifications I consider probably the most exciting aspect of science/philosophy relations possible on the horizon. Your own theoretical ecology surely will benefit if only for the proximity of such research. It makes me want to move to and attend the University of Vermont.
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
farcaller – Yes, you can quote anything posted in Immanence, as long as you credit it to Immanence. (See the Creative Commons license associated with the site.) No, I don’t have an account on Twitter, and for the moment don’t intend to have one.