Epistry · Philosophy in executable form

A Flourishing Planet for All Beings

I’m Rajesh Kasturirangan: mathematician, cognitive scientist, entrepreneur, but mostly generalist-philosopher. I call my generalist method Epistry.

Line drawing of Rajesh Kasturirangan, smiling with his arms folded

build what the ideas demand.

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 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.

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The new generalism

Wisdom Lies in Connection

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; creating shared understanding out of disjoint fragments.

At the same time, AI is becoming increasingly capable at specialist skills. It can search, calculate, code, analyze, and optimize at a speed we cannot match.

This does not make human intelligence irrelevant. Instead, it gives us the opportunity to operate at a higher level of abstraction.

Epistry is my name for this new generalism: the practice of imagining new worlds, connecting knowledge across domains and turning synthesis into action.

FrameConnectTranslateIntegrateImagineAct

Epistry in practice

Six ways of fleshing it out.

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.

01

Minds without brains

What if agency, memory, and decision-making are features of life itself, beginning with single cells?

E. coli reading an enormous book
02

The Globe is Inside the Planet

How must politics, economics, and technology change when society is understood as part of planetary metabolism rather than something above it?

A paramecium examining a cellular globe
03

Habitability and Multispecies Flourishing

What conditions allow human and nonhuman beings to thrive together, and how might those conditions guide the design of planetary institutions?

An amoeba tending a multispecies habitat
04

Hyperproblems

How can people, disciplines, and organizations coordinate around challenges whose causes and consequences exceed them all?

Microorganisms collaborating to untangle a complex knot
05

Metabology

How do flows of energy, materials, information, and capital shape who flourishes, who becomes vulnerable, and who gets to decide?

Microorganisms passing energy and materials through a living network
06

Designing possible worlds

How can models, simulations, gatherings, artifacts, and institutions help us explore futures before committing to them?

A bacterium drafting a strange possible world

Things I am making

no thought without prototype. no prototype without thought.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world.The point, however, is to inhabit it.
E. coli, an amoeba, and other protists collaborating to build an organic gadget

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