John Brockman | |
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 John Brockman in 2009 | |
| Born | February 16, 1941 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | literary agent, editor, writer |
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."
While working as a banker at the time, Brockman had a chance encounter in Central Park where he met avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. This meeting marked the beginning of Brockman's involvement in the arts, leading him to manage performances and film programs.
Brockman had a notable connection to Andy Warhol during the 1960s. Brockman was part of the New York art scene, where he engaged with various avant-garde and underground cinema activities. During this period, Brockman was known as a "Warhol groupie" and was part of the circle that Warhol frequented, which included other artists and musicians like Bob Dylan.
Brockman's involvement in the art scene included managing the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, a hub for underground cinema, where he worked with various artists, including Warhol. This connection is further evidenced by photographs of Brockman with Warhol, which he often shares with profile writers. His immersion in the arts eventually led him to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences, becoming a key figure in promoting scientific and intellectual discourse.
The Harvard-MIT Art/Science Meeting was an innovative event that brought together artists and scientists for a collaborative seminar. It was initiated by Brockman after receiving a call from Arthur K. Solomon, a biophysics professor at Harvard Medical School, and Walter A. Rosenblith, a communications biophysics professor at MIT. Both were close associates of Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in cybernetics, who had recently passed away. They were inspired by articles in The New Yorker and The Nation about the expanded cinema festival, which highlighted the intersection of art and Wiener's work on cybernetics. Solomon asked Brockman to organize a group of avant-garde artists to meet with scientists from Harvard and MIT for a two-day seminar in Cambridge. Notable scientists included Anthony Oettinger, an AI pioneer from Harvard, and Doc Edgerton from MIT, known for inventing ultra-high-speed photography. The artists included Ken Dewey and Terry Riley from Theatre X, as well as Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan from USCO.
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]
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 known as 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.
Francisco Javier Varela García was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.
Bruno Latour was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris from 1982 to 2006, he became professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006–2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art, and design. As of 2014, Media lab's research groups include fetus, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.
David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is a professor of computer science at Yale University.
New mysterianism, or commonly just mysterianism, is a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be resolved by humans. The unresolvable problem is how to explain the existence of qualia. In terms of the various schools of philosophy of mind, mysterianism is a form of nonreductive physicalism. Some "mysterians" state their case uncompromisingly ; others take a "pseudo-mysterian" stance, being of the belief that consciousness is not within the grasp of present human understanding, but may be comprehensible to future advances of science and technology.
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.
Christof Koch is an American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He was the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He remains at the Institute as a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, that funds research meant to alleviate suffering, anxiety and other forms of distress in all people.
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe is a 1959 book by Arthur Koestler. It traces the history of Western cosmology from ancient Mesopotamia to Isaac Newton. He suggests that discoveries in science arise through a process akin to sleepwalking. Not that they arise by chance, but rather that scientists are neither fully aware of what guides their research, nor are they fully aware of the implications of what they discover.
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".
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."
Criticism of postmodernism is intellectually diverse, reflecting various critical attitudes toward postmodernity, postmodern philosophy, postmodern art, and postmodern architecture. Postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection towards what it describes as the grand narratives and ideologies associated with modernism, especially those associated with Enlightenment rationality. Thus, while common targets of postmodern criticism include universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress, critics of postmodernism often defend such concepts.
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.
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