Sebastian Saviano

Areas of specialization / interest: Social and political philosophy; philosophy of social science; philosophy of AI and AI governance; social and political epistemology; metaethics and moral epistemology. Sebastian Saviano is an independent scholar whose work concerns social and institutional systems under stress: how power accumulates beyond institutional boundaries, how legitimacy dissolves through threshold events, how misclassification distorts governance, and how belief is shaped by the environments in which it forms. His research spans five connected programs: a theory of power convergence and the "cumulative individual," which models how structural, coercive, symbolic, and networked power integrate within single actors; a post-Newtonian epistemology of social transformation built around Potentialism and the Quantum-Continuity Model; a critique of agency attribution in AI governance, which reclassifies AI systems as constraint-bound output generators rather than agents; an institutional account of conspiracy thinking that locates belief in systemic conditions rather than individual cognition; and a structural theory of moral progress distinguishing the deepening of protected harm from the widening of who is protected. This work is developed through working papers and in three book-length projects: The Allegiance Paradox (2025), Legitimate Distrust (2026), and I, System (Sept. 2026).