Sublime

The book performs the curiosity of which it speaks.

That is, we may be able to graph how ideas slowly accrete into architectures of individual and collective knowledge.

Potentialities for growth, then, are available in all directions—toward what has never been thought and back to what must be rethought.

It is the edge that straddles the divide between the more-than-human and the simply human.

Committed to reducing the social inequalities and loosening the traditional disciplinary boundaries that subtend the academy, we aim to facilitate freedom for everyone’s curiosity to pursue seemingly incommensurable ideas and applications.

While scientific progress, then, proceeds by curiously exploring adjacent possibilities, preference is given to work closely tied to existing science and conducted by a privileged subset of scientists.

But there are also societal logics and neural constraints that often determine which idea trees get nurtured best and celebrated most, at what times and in which places.

Collectivities of humans, moreover, take a myriad of shapes, from small groups to organizations and transnational corporations. This is not even to mention the curious possibilities pursued in and among the more-than-human world. The dynamics we are describing, then, are scalar in nature and have wide conceptual purchase accordingly.

Furthermore, interweaving the voices of others throughout our journey is no mere ploy of stylistic enrichment or evidentiary justification.