Matter, Understanding, and Human Formation
Integrative Framework for the Nature, Origins, Relationships, and Meaning of Matter—and What Matters
Connecting scientific and engineering inquiry with philosophical reflection and perspectives from wisdom traditions, to investigate matter, our understanding of the material world, and the implications of that understanding for meaning and human flourishing.
Integrative Inquiry
Conceptual Framework
From matter to human formation
A cumulative and recursive inquiry into how humans encounter, understand, interpret, and transform the material world—and how, in turn, these processes shape meaning and who we become.
Why INFORM?
Human knowledge of the material world has never been greater.
Science allows us to observe nature across extraordinary scales. Engineering enables us to transform matter with unprecedented precision and consequence. However, increasing specialization can fragment our understanding of how these discoveries relate to larger questions concerning reality, meaning, responsibility, and our place in the world.
INFORM asks whether these questions can be examined together by building on the distinctive methods, insights, and limits of the disciplines and traditions through which humans pursue understanding.
Its premise is fundamental:
To understand matter is to deepen our understanding of the reality of which we ourselves are part.
Integrative Inquiry
A Common Inquiry. Diverse Approaches to Understanding.
No single discipline encompasses the full range of questions raised by the material world and the human encounter with existence.
INFORM creates a space for sustained conversation among science and engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, and diverse intellectual and wisdom traditions.
The objective is integrative inquiry: asking what becomes visible when different approaches to understanding are brought into rigorous conversation.
A Recurring Relationship
INFORM advances a proposition for systematic investigation
Human beings encounter matter, develop knowledge of it, interpret that knowledge through larger frameworks of understanding, derive meaning and value, and translate these understandings into action and material expression. The resulting material and cultural environments subsequently participate in forming human beings and conditioning future encounters with the world.
INFORM investigates whether recurring patterns within these relationships can be identified across time, cultures, civilizations, and contemporary technological change.
From Inquiry to Research
Research across disciplines and civilizations
INFORM takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to investigating the material world, how humans understand and transform it, and the enduring human encounter with existence itself.
Matter
How have humans understood and transformed the material world?
Exploring changing conceptions of matter, nature, origins, organization, complexity, and causation across scientific traditions, technologies, cultures, and civilizations.
Understanding
How does what we know shape how we understand reality and our place within it?
Examining how knowledge and lived experience interact with philosophical reflection, Weltanschauung, cultural inheritance, and diverse intellectual and wisdom traditions in shaping understandings of reality, the human condition, meaning, value, purpose, and responsibility.
Human Formation
How does what we understand, value, and create shape who we become?
Investigating how understanding, Weltanschauung, values, technology, and material expression shape human life—and how the worlds we create affect subsequent ways of understanding and living.
An Interconnected Inquiry, Across Time and Civilizations
Origin
Where INFORM began
INFORM emerged from the questions explored in the course Foundations Matter: Toward an Understanding of Matter and Matter Within. Foundations Matter thereby constitutes a living setting in which the integrative inquiry of INFORM can be explored, questioned and further developed.
Where Research Meets Education
Foundations Matter
Toward an Understanding of Matter and Matter Within
Foundations Matter is the educational expression of the INFORM inquiry.
Beginning with matter as a common foundation of scientific and engineering inquiry, the course steadily expands to encompass a wide range of questions related to matter, matter within, and what matters. What is the material and immaterial nature of matter? What can I know about matter? How do I know that I know it? What is the relationship of my being to my matter? What is the purpose of my matter? What matters to my being?
Learn about the courseFoundations Matter—a panoramic view of the human journey seeking to understand the nature of reality and the nature of humankind.
On the Horizon
Coming into View
INFORM is exploring new opportunities for research, education, scholarly exchange, and public engagement.
Seminars
Interdisciplinary conversations bringing together scholars and students to explore questions of matter, understanding, and human formation.
Research
Developing interdisciplinary and comparative inquiry around the INFORM framework.
Public Lectures
Accessible conversations connecting scientific, philosophical, humanistic, and wisdom perspectives on the material world and the human condition.