Jean-Pierre Dupuy is professor of social and political philosophy and director of the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée at the École Polytechnique, Paris. At Stanford University, he is a professor of French and Italian, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information and professor of political science by courtesy. A member of the French Academy of Technology, Dupuy’s research interests encompass cultural theory, social and political philosophy, the cognitive sciences, the epistemology of the social sciences, and the relationship of critical theory to logical and scientific thinking, extending to the paradoxes of rationality and the philosophical underpinnings and the future societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. His book, The Mechanization of the Mind (2000), examined how the founders of cybernetics laid the foundations not only for cognitive science, but also artificial intelligence, and foreshadowed the development of chaos theory, complexity theory, and other scientific and philosophical breakthroughs. His recent publications include La Panique (2003), Aux origines des sciences cognitives (2005), and Retour de Tchernobyl journal d'un homme en cole`re (2006).