Time and catastrophe : a conversation with Jean-Pierre Dupuy

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1941–) is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris, and Professor of French and of Science, Technology, and Society as well as in the Political Science Department (by courtesy) at Stanford University. For a long time, he has been involved in advising French governmental bodies charged with over- seeing and regulating various scientific and technological industries, and was the first chair of the Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety and Security. The author of over thirty books, Dupuy’s work is avowedly interdisciplinary, engaging with issues in complexity and catastrophe theory, economic modelling, cultural analysis and anthropology, the philosophy of risk, uncertainty, and the philosophy of science (including cognitive science) and technology.1 Without ever reducing social systems to logical/ formal, biological or biochemical ones, Dupuy has continually sought to examine how a variety of seemingly unrelated disciplines might bear on fundamental questions in the humanities and the social sciences.