Recent Papers

• The Complexity of Anticipation, invited paper, accepted by Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 1, 2009
• An Introduction to the Ontology of Anticipation, accepted by Futures
• The Many Aspects of Anticipation, Foresight, special issue on Understanding Anticipatory Systems, 2009
• Anticipation and Conflicts, presented at the conference Understanding Conflict, Aarhus
• On the Concept of Person: The Social Nature of Persons (forthcoming in B. Nicolescu and M. Stavinschi, eds, Transdisciplinary Approaches of the Dialogue between Science, Art and Religion in the Europe of Tomorrow)
• Three Concepts of Person (forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference Action Theories: Social Action, Theory of Mind, Philosophy of Action, Religious Action)
• The Structure of Motivation. A First Introduction, forthcoming in R. Poli. ed., Causality and Motivation

Roberto Poli, PhD

Research

I am working on three main topics, namely:

• The category of person and the theory of values.
• Ontology, in both its traditional, philosophical, acceptation and the new, computer-based acceptation.
• The category of the future and in particular the theory of anticipatory systems.

From my own perspective point, these three topics are mutually interrelated and are but different sides of a unique categorical framework. Unfortunately, however, mainstream wisdom assigns them to different disciplinary fields.

In order to better counteract the unwelcome consequences of this highly unfortunate situation, 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:

• University of Trento
• Department of Sociology and Social Research
• 41, Venice sq
• 38100 Trento (Italy)

phone

• +39 0461 881403

e-mail:

• roberto.poli (at) soc.unitn.it

News

• November 2008. Foreword to C. Scognamiglio and C. Gnoli, Ontologia e organizzazione della conoscenza. Introduzione ai fondamenti teorici dell'indicizzazione semantica, Pensa Multimedia, Lecce 2008 (blog: http://prospettiveontologiche.blogspot.com/ -- in Italian)
• November 2008. Nominated to the board of Economy Transdisciplinarity Cognition
• July 2008. During the 2008 Metanexus conference in Madrid, the decision has been taken to continue the SophiaEuropa project, albeit in a new format. Poli has been voted to the project's new board and has been nominated coordinator of SophiaEuropa.
• July 2008. Nominated to the board of the new Balkan Journal of Philosophy

In Preparation

• TAO-Theory and Applications of Ontology. Vol 1. The Philosophical Stance (with Johanna Seibt)
  
• Vol. 2: The Information-science Stance (with Achilles Kameas and Michael Healy)
• Causality and Motivation