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| Marvin B. Peláez |
Welcome to my personal website! I am a doctoral candidate in the Methodology of the Sciences at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), Poland, where my research recovers the methodological tradition of the Lublin Philosophical School and applies it to questions in the policy sciences, science advisory institutions, and the philosophical foundations of science policy that contemporary frameworks have not been able to resolve from within their own terms. My academic formation includes graduate theological study in the classical Catholic intellectual tradition, alongside a Master of Public Administration. I have served for nearly thirty-five years as an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
These three formations, spanning classical philosophy and theology, public administration, and federal statistical data collection, are not separate careers but a single intellectual project. The philosophical foundations that modern disciplines have largely set aside remain quietly operative in institutional decision-making, science advisory processes, and public policy. My work names and examines those foundations.
The Philosopher's Compass™
Most decisions fail not from a lack of intelligence or information, but from misalignment among the questions that every consequential choice requires: What are we actually trying to achieve? What kind of situation are we genuinely facing? Who is responsible and answerable? What constraints cannot be ignored?
The Philosopher's Compass is a consulting practice and intellectual project built on a classical insight: that good judgment requires all four of these questions to be asked honestly and simultaneously. When any one of them is suppressed, whether by institutional pressure, habitual assumption, or the pace of events, the result is a characteristic and diagnosable failure.
The framework draws on the Classical philosophical tradition, recovered for contemporary use and applied to decision-making in policy, organizational, and institutional contexts. It is the same framework I apply in my doctoral research on the philosophy of science, made accessible for practitioners who need a principled diagnostic tool rather than a theoretical treatise.
Current projects include a book applying this framework to six episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series as controlled case studies in decision-making under pressure, and a seminar series introducing the framework to policy professionals and organizational leaders.