Logic in Reality

Joseph E. Brenner was born in Paris in 1934, the son of the American sculptor Michael Brenner (Lithuania, 1885 – New York, 1969). After primary and secondary education in New York, he received B.A. and M.S. degrees from the University of Chicago. In 1958, he earned a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, which was followed by post-doctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1960, he joined the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Company at its Wilmington, Delaware laboratory as a polymer chemist. From 1965 to his retirement in 1994, he was involved in corporate development and technology transfer with Du Pont de Nemours International in Geneva, Switzerland, working primarily in the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. In 1998, he began collaboration with Basarab Nicolescu, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Paris VI and President of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET) in Paris. The focus of this on-going collaboration has been to make the logical system of the Franco-Romanian thinker Stéphane Lupasco (Bucharest, 1900 – Paris, 1988) accessible to English-language readers. Brenner’s extension and up-dating of this work has been the subject of publications and presentations at conferences and seminars in Europe, Brazil and the U.S.A. Dr. Brenner is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the New York Academy of Sciences; and the Swiss Society for Logic and the Philosophy of Science.