I am working on three main topics:
- The category of the future, with an explicit focus on social foresight and the theory of anticipatory systems, i.e., systems able to take decisions according to their possible future development.
- The category of person and the theory of values.
- Ontology, in both its traditional, philosophical, understanding and the new, computer-based understanding.
These three topics are mutually interrelated and I came to see them as different sides of a unique categorical framework. To show that they are indeed mutually related one another, I am starting to address the problem of developing a synthetic methodology, able to go beyond the limitations of the otherwise much needed analytic decompositions of the whole of reality into smaller and smaller fragments.
s-mail: Department of Sociology and Social Research; 26, Verdi street, 38100 Trento (Italy)
phone: +39 0461 881403
e-mail: roberto (dot) poli (at) unitn (dot) it
I am specially interested in your second point which is related to the first part of my book ” Penser le Futur”. I do not think it possible to have a scientific aspect basis for Futures Studies, at the same time it is indeed necessary to have philosophical basis for them. If you are interested in this theoretical aspect I am happy to discuss it.
Dear Eleonora,
Starting from Futures Studies (FS), the sciences we are referring to cannot be physics or chemistry. Eventually, sociology should be our reference point. From this perspective point, I do not see why sociology should be acknowledged as a full-fledged science and FS as nothing more than a collection of practices. I do not see FS as structurally weaker than sociology (or, if you prefer, sociology as structurally stronger than FS). Both are characterized by the presence of an unresolved divide between quantitative and qualitative methods; both suffer for the lack of an adequate theoretical basis (the founding fathers of sociology did provide underlying theories, progressively lost in the subsequent decades. The very few contemporary sociologists with a strong theoretical attitude — e.g., Luhmann — are not perceived by many as ‘true’ sociologists); both lack a suitable philosophical clarification of their presuppositions (one can detect the lack of such clarification in the assumption, held by a vast majority of working sociologists, of methodological individualism, a categorially indefensible position). When de Jouvenel claimed that ‘futura’ do not pertain to science, he was implicitly accepting a positivistic position and he was making reference to natural science. I think that today we can do better and try a step further.
Heartly, roberto