We’re an applied philosophy network formed from the belief that the world’s largest problems and most difficult questions are not considered with the Big Picture complexity needed to see their transformational potential.
Simply put, a whole new way of seeing reality is needed if we’re to adequately navigate the scope and scale of today’s global issues. To this end, IAM is committed to cutting-edge research across four major vectors:
The Metacrisis
What is the nature of the interconnected social, ecological, ethical, epistemic, and existential challenges of our time—AKA “the metacrisis”?
Worldviews
What are worldviews and how do their frameworks of meaning and value transform in response to civilizational steering problems?
Integrative Metatheory
What sort of Big Picture philosophy lies at the heart of the Integrative Worldview currently emerging to transcend the limits of our prior meaning-making structures?
Social Impact
How can we apply the insights from integrative thinking to the complex challenges we face today, and what new institutions can we incubate to address these systemic problems for human flourishing?
By advancing our understanding in these key domains and operationalizing their insights, we endeavor to help catalyze the sort of liberatory transformations needed for a society of human flourishing in the 21st century.
Our Academic Journal
Integration is a peer-reviewed, inter-, trans-, and archdisciplinary journal committed to advancing the integrative study and applied use of metatheory and systems thinking for engaging with the unprecedented complexity of the 21st century. It provides a scholarly home for those forging connections across domains, traditions, and levels of analysis in pursuit of deeper coherence and actionable wisdom.
A Primer on Metatheories:
What most people think of as science is what metatheorists call “middle-range” theory. A theory of gravitation, or political preferences, or international trade deficits, are all theories that start with real-world phenomena as their “data”. A theory then tries to create an explanatory model for why reality gives us that data.
Metatheory sits “above” theory. Where theory takes real-world phenomena as its “data”, metatheory takes the theories themselves as its “data”, helping to provide a bigger, more coherent picture of a given knowledge domain.
Integrative Metatheories take that even further, attempting to synthesize the highest-order Big Pictures that might organize all theories, from all domains, and thereby simplify (but not reduce) the complexity into knowledge that’s more usable but better matched to the real complexity of the 21st century.
IAM is an applied philosophy network conceptualizing the Integrative Metatheories into problem-specific insights and toolkits that can help subject-matter experts and/or financial stakeholders generate novel social transformation in their domains.
Applied Metatheory Initiatives (AMIs)
IAM Media
IAM Publications
The IAM Foundation
IAM Foundation, Inc. was established in 2023 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to provide seed grant funding, education and support for research and innovation of targeted, high-priority issues by IAM network investigators or teams. The IAM Foundation aims to be supported by world-class donors sharing our vision of and commitment to the potential for Big Pictures to transform some of our most intractable challenges.
