John Brockman | |
|---|---|
 John Brockman in 2009 | |
| Born | February 16, 1941 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | literary agent |
John Brockman (born February 16, 1941) is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.
Brockman was born to immigrants of Polish-Jewish descent in a poor Irish Catholic enclave of Boston, Massachusetts. [1] Expanding on C.P. Snow's "two cultures", he introduced the "third culture" [2] consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."
He led a scientific salon for 20 years, asking an annual question to a host of renowned scientists and publishing their answers in book form, [3] which he decided to symbolically close down in 2018. [4]
In an interview with Prince Andrew dated November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking. [7]
Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking. [8]
Brockman's famous literary dinners—held during the TED Conference—were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings. [9] This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires. [10] [11]
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Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution is a 1995 book by John Brockman which discusses the work of several well-known scientists who are directly communicating their new, sometimes provocative, ideas to the general public. John Brockman has continued the themes of 'The Third Culture' in the website of the Edge Foundation, where leading scientists and thinkers contribute their thoughts in plain English.
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
"The Two Cultures" is the first part of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, which was published in book form as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution the same year. Its thesis was that science and the humanities, which represented "the intellectual life of the whole of western society", had become split into "two cultures" and that this division was a major handicap to both in solving the world's problems.
David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is a professor of computer science at Yale University.
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project in 2008 to investigate fundamental questions about the universe and served as the project's director.
The history of the social sciences has origin in the common stock of Western philosophy and shares various precursors, but began most intentionally in the early 18th century with the positivist philosophy of science. Since the mid-20th century, the term " social science" has come to refer more generally, not just to sociology, but to all those disciplines which analyze society and culture; from anthropology to psychology to media studies.
The Reality Club was a group of mostly New York City-based intellectuals that met regularly from 1981 through 1996 for seminars on a variety of topics. In January 1997, it reorganized as a web-based publication maintained by the Edge Foundation (edge.org).
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable is a book edited by John Brockman, which deals with "dangerous" ideas, or ideas that some people would react to in ways that suggest a disruption of morality and ethics. Scientists, philosophers, artists, and various other groups of people have written in to the online salon called the Edge, where thinkers in several areas post and discuss their ideas. This collection of responses forms the entirety of the book. The basic concept behind the book is "to gather a hundred of the most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves".
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty is a non-fiction book published by Harper Perennial and edited by literary agent John Brockman that includes an introduction by novelist Ian McEwan. The book consists of responses to a question posed by the Edge Foundation, with answers as short as one sentence and as long as a few pages. Among the 107 published contributors are scientists and philosophers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, Sir Martin Rees, and Craig Venter; as well as convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Some contributions were not included in the print book, including those by Benoit Mandelbrot and computer scientist John McCarthy but are among 120 responses available online.
The Edge Foundation, Inc. is an association of science and technology intellectuals created in 1988 as an outgrowth of The Reality Club. Its main activities are reflected on the edge.org website, edited by publisher and businessman John Brockman. The site is a critically noted online magazine exploring scientific and intellectual ideas. In 2019, BuzzFeed News reviewed Edge’s IRS filings and reported that Jeffrey Epstein was "by far its largest financial donor", and that "his association with Edge gave him access to leading scientists and figures in the tech industry."
Spatial intelligence is an area in the theory of multiple intelligences that deals with spatial judgment and the ability to visualize with the mind's eye. It is defined by Howard Gardner as a human computational capacity that provides the ability or mental skill to solve spatial problems of navigation, visualization of objects from different angles and space, faces or scenes recognition, or to notice fine details. Gardner further explains that Spatial Intelligence could be more effective to solve problems in areas related to realistic, thing-oriented, and investigative occupations. This capability is a brain skill that is also found in people with visual impairment. As researched by Gardner, a blind person can recognize shapes in a non-visual way. The spatial reasoning of the blind person allows them to translate tactile sensations into mental calculations of length and visualizations of form.
Daniel T. Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor in the Department of Psychology. Willingham's research focuses on the application of findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education.
Logology is the study of all things related to science and its practitioners—philosophical, biological, psychological, societal, historical, political, institutional, financial. The term "logology" is back-formed from the suffix "-logy", as in "geology", "anthropology", etc., in the sense of the "study of science". The word "logology" provides grammatical variants not available with the earlier terms "science of science" and "sociology of science", such as "logologist", "logologize", "logological", and "logologically". The emerging field of metascience is a subfield of logology.
The Penultimate Curiosity: How science swims in the slipstream of ultimate questions is a book jointly written by English author and artist Roger Wagner and English scientist Andrew Briggs, which sets out to answer one of the most important, vexed, and profound questions about the development of human thought: ‘What lies at the root of the long entanglement between science and religion?’
"Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal" is an episode of the BBC's news and current affairs programme Newsnight broadcast on BBC Two on 16 November 2019. In the 58-minute programme, Prince Andrew, Duke of York was interviewed by Emily Maitlis about his relationship with the American convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew's responses in the interview received negative reactions from both the media and the public. In May 2020, it was announced that he would indefinitely withdraw from his public roles.
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