Articles ⁽⁸⁾

Before you engage with this essay, dear reader, please heed my warning. I have made my best attempt to show how cruelty breaks people, and how it’s embedded in the deepest of our cultural structure. If you engage further, you will read about illness, child…

Is there such a thing as the “dynamics” of history? Cliodynamics, in substance, is just what it says on the package. It is the application of concepts and methods from dynamical systems theory to the study of history (clio). In its contemporary form, it was…

Our views of the relation between science and the natural world tend to gravitate between two defining positions : either science offers us a true (although perhaps limited) representation of physical reality, or our representations of the world (although perhaps useful) simply lack the properties…

Ideology is an extremely polysemic term, which does not entail more in itself than the existence of some system of belief, values or discourse that is somehow mobilized in the political field. It is sometimes used in debates as a derogatory term, to contrast “ideology”…

The cognitive sciences are an interdisciplinary research project, built in the context of Macy’s conferences which established the computationalist paradigm comparing the functioning of the human mind with that of a computer. Sixty-seven years later, this project seems to have exploded between many competing approaches…

“Naturalizing” social sciences ? Naturalism is a family of philosophical and scientific positions broadly stating that all observable phenomenon are part to the same causally integrated world. Natural scientist typically work toward explain those phenomenons by exposing and formalizing underlying causal relations, notably through building…

Cliodynamics and science-fiction Cliodynamics is a field which very existence is controversial. Among all subdisciplines of cultural evolution, “history as a science” is the only one that consistently draw criticism when it is discussed - while its claims are by no mean stronger than those…

States today seem to exert an undisputed hegemony over the governance of human societies. It seems natural to project their predominance on the past as well as on the future, or at least to imagine the world outside state regulation as wild, uncultivated, and unfit…