“From a Smarter Planet to a Wiser Earth: A Quaker Philosopher’s Experiments in Moving Out of the Ivory Tower”
Speaker: College of the Atlantic Professor Gray Cox
How can we ask philosophical questions and talk meaningfully about them in ways that connect with our everyday lives, the problems our communities face, and the big challenges that threaten the future of our grandchildren and the legacies we will leave? Gray will provide some examples from his own work and others’ to illustrate approaches to this. He will look at ways we deal with conflict, economics, ecology, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in our world. The talk will be followed by an opportunity for dialogue on Friday evening. Also, on Saturday morning he will provide a follow up session to further discuss themes raised in the talk as well as to explore the methods of communal discernment and “spirit-led” research that he and other members of the Quaker Institute for the Future have been experimenting with for 20 years.
About the Speaker:
Gray Cox teaches in philosophy, peace studies, language learning and artificial intelligence as part of College of the Atlantic’s program in Human Ecology. He has been long involved in the development of international studies and languages at COA and led a number of study abroad programs in Mexico and France. He has written a wide variety of papers and three books: The Ways of Peace: A Philosophy of Peace as Action (1986); The Will at the Crossroads: A Reconstruction of Kant’s Moral Philosophy (1983); A Quaker Approach to Research: Collaborative Practice and Communal Discernment (2014. A fourth, From a Smarter Planet to a Wiser Earth: Artificial Intelligence and Collaborative Wisdom will be published in 2022. He was Principal Investigator on an NSF funded project in sustainability studies dealing with: “Modern Consumer Families and Self-Reliant, Maine Yankees: Two Cultures of Residential Heating”. In recent years his research and conference presentations have focused on the intersections between trends in artificial intelligence, the Singularity, Gandhian satyagraha, national security, and developments in conflict resolution approaches to ethics and social change. He is a long term member of Acadia Friends Meeting and is also a cofounder and the current Clerk of the Quaker Institute for the Future. QIF is a think tank that supports published research which is both informed by Quaker values like peace and ecological resilience and employs methods of spirit-led, communal discernment (www.quakerinstitute.org). He is a singer/songwriter who plays guitar, bones a little clarinet and has done several albums of original music in English, Spanish and French (https://graycox.bandcamp.com). His studies included a B.A. at Wesleyan University, 1974, and an M. A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy, at Vanderbilt University, 1981. He grew up in Bar Harbor and got his start in philosophy as a member of the Philosophy of Education Committee for the newly formed Mount Desert Island Regional High School in 1968-1970. He is happily married with a host of children and grandchildren and lives in Bar Harbor where he loves to hike, bike, garden, ski and get out on the water.