Epistry · Philosophy in executable form
I’m Rajesh Kasturirangan: mathematician and cognitive scientist by training, entrepreneur by inclination, and generalist-philosopher by avocation. I call my generalist method Epistry.
I’m the founder of Socratus, a studio for thinking through and (dis)solving wicked problems.
We bring citizens, scientists, artists, technologists, and changemakers into carefully designed spaces; surface collective wisdom; and turn what emerges into tools, processes, and public experiments.
My academic life - including positions at MIT and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, where I led the Cognition Programme - trained me to investigate difficult questions. My entrepreneurial life asks a different question: what must we build so those ideas can change the world?
I move between imagining futures, creating institutions, convening publics, and prototyping paths toward a flourishing planet.
Connect with SocratusThe new generalism
The crucial problems of our time are too complex for any single person, discipline, or institution.
Each holds only part of the picture. The generalist’s role is not to master every part, but to connect them - translating between fields, tracing relationships across scales, and threading fragments of knowledge into a shared understanding from which action becomes possible.
At the same time, AI is becoming increasingly capable at specialist skills. It can search, calculate, code, analyze, and optimize at a speed and scale we cannot match. This does not make human intelligence irrelevant. It gives us the opportunity to operate at a higher level of abstraction - framing problems, integrating perspectives, judging what matters, imagining possible futures, and deciding what should be built.
Epistry is my name for this new generalism: the practice of imagining new worlds, connecting knowledge across domains and turning synthesis into action.
Epistry in practice
Epistry is not only a method. I am developing it through a family of connected inquiries, each exploring what generalist thought can reveal and make possible at a different scale.
What if agency, memory, and decision-making are features of life itself, beginning with single cells?
How must politics, economics, and technology change when society is understood as part of planetary metabolism rather than something above it?
What conditions allow human and nonhuman beings to thrive together, and how might those conditions guide the design of planetary institutions?
How can people, disciplines, and organizations coordinate around challenges whose causes and consequences exceed them all?
How do flows of energy, materials, information, and capital shape who flourishes, who becomes vulnerable, and who gets to decide?
How can models, simulations, gatherings, artifacts, and institutions help us explore futures before committing to them?
no thought without prototype. no prototype without thought.
Bringing the right people into carefully designed spaces to think through—and (dis)solve—wicked problems.
Meet the collective BScientific inquiryExploring the origins of intelligence and agency from the bottom up, beginning not with the brain but with the living cell.
Explore Cellosophy CNewsletterPlanetary thought on how our lives are intertwined with other beings on our only home.
Read & subscribeThe philosophers have only interpreted the world.The point, however, is to inhabit it.
If you have come this far
Join curious generalists, scientists, students, changemakers, and fellow travelers thinking across boundaries about what comes next.
Subscribe to Ranganaut