A Tribute to Edgar Morin

Last week, Edgar Morin died at 104 years old.

He was born into a world sliding toward fascism, chose resistance, and spent the rest of his life building the intellectual case for why simple thinking is dangerous. He called it pensée complexe. We might call it the courage to see the world as it actually is — entangled, uncertain, alive with contradiction.

For those of us who work at the edges of complexity science, his death leaves a particular silence. Not just the loss of a thinker, but the loss of a witness. Someone who had lived what happens when reductionist thinking takes power — and who never stopped warning us.

We wanted to gather. Not to eulogise, but to think together.

On 15 June, Jean Boulton and Pedro Portela will hold an informal one-hour conversation in his memory — about the ideas he left us, why they matter now more than ever, and what it means to carry this work forward in a world that increasingly prefers simple answers.

No slides. No agenda. Just an honest conversation, open to anyone who has been touched by his work.