Philosophy Today

To talk about automation and invisibility in our digitally projected world, I argue the case for the “cancelled” or lost voices of postphenomenology such as, most notably, Günther Anders. Reflecting on Nietzsche as on the role of GPS for location and for dating services like Grindr, I take up Nietzschean humanism (all-too humanism) including the fragility of his portable brass typing ball, latterly not unlike daisy wheel printer technologies and the programmed death of ink jet printers. With a casual reflection on pocket robots and screen-intentionality, GPS, triangulating perambulation, and programmed addiction, I raise the necropolitical question of climate change as of technology and its scotosis.

The article reflects on Heidegger’s admission in the 1966 Spiegel Interview that he was shocked by images of the Earth taken from space. It asks what these images were and shows that far from testifying to the encounter of planetary technics and the modern human they evince the meeting between an improvised automated technology of image capture and contingency.

This article asks how can we articulate the limit of artificial intelligence, which virtually has no limit? Or maybe the definition of AI already implies its limit, how Marvin Minsky once declared that there is no generally accepted theory of intelligence, and that AI is only one particular way of modelling it. This article revisits the debate between Minsky and Hubert Dreyfus and repositions them in terms of an opposition between mechanism and organism, in order to expose the limit of Dreyfus’s Heideggerian critique. It suggests reflecting on the relation between noodiversity and technodiversity to methodologically broaden the concept of intelligence, and on how different concepts of intelligence could be thought by introducing the Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan’s interpretation of Kant’s intellectual intuition.

The scope of the paper is to present the concept of the radical dyad of the “non-human,” in an attempt to think radical humanity in terms of Marxian materialism, which is the product of approaching Marx’s writings on “the real” and “the physical” by way of François Laruelle’s non-philosophical method. Unlike posthumanism, inspired by critical theory and the method of poststructuralism, the theory of the non-human, as a radical dyad of technology in the generic sense of the word (ranging from the techné of speaking a natural language to AI technology) and the organic understood as physicality, does away with anthropocentrism. Moreover, it does away with any anthropomorphology of thought, that is, it does away with any theorizing or philosophy that is centered on the notion of (human) subjectivity or, to borrow a Laruellian term, any “posture of thought” that is molded according to the structure of subjectivity centered thinking,

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology.

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses his work on the Amerindian perspectivism, multinaturalism; the relation between nature, culture and technics in his ethnographic studies; as well as the necessity of a non-anthropocentric definition of technology. He also discusses a haunting futurism of ecological crisis and automation of the Anthropocene, and explores a “strategic primitivism” as survival tool.

In this dialogue, Hiroki Azuma discusses with Yuk Hui about the perception of technology in Japan after the defeat in the Second World War, from the Kyoto School to the postmodern critics, and the ambivalent conflicts between the modern and the tradition. The postmodern culture has a different signification in Japan than in the West as well as in other parts of Asia. Azuma documents the rise of the Otaku culture in Japan, and calls them “database animals,” a thesis that he formulated through his reading of Alexandre Kojève’s end of man and the absorption of the human subject into the technological world.

This African moral framework discusses distant poverty as human vulnerability. Contextually, if vulnerability means human frailty, relative to some opposing facts of life, and that poverty makes the human person frail, relative to some largely unrealized/unrealizable desirables without assistance, then distant poverty as human vulnerability invariably connects, significantly, with poor dependency: poor people are vulnerable as dependent on the assisting other. Some fundamental questions arise: 1) What is the ontology of distant poverty as human vulnerability? 2) In what ways does the idea of poverty as human vulnerability essentially and morally connect with the idea of dependency? 3) Is the issue of addressing the problem of distant poverty as human vulnerability a question of perfect or imperfect moral duty or both? 4) In what ways do the perfect or imperfect moral duty (or both) connect to positive and negative moral duties? 5) What moral framework best accommodates, all things considered, moral duties? Considering these questions, this work advances that African ethics (AE) as character ethics, fundamentally serves as a better moral framework, compared to the Western ethics (WE) that has dominated the debates on addressing the questions for years.

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry (1984), the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined.

The notion of “weak action” is developed in this paper in an attempt to overcome the schism between the action of a free political subject on the one hand, and their dependency on the support of others and the environment on the other. This paper focuses foremost on Judith Butler’s later work raising two different questions. First, following Butler and her critical reading of Levinas, the problem is raised how and at what price the ethics of vulnerability would be able to become not only the source of a critique of politics, but also the source of a concrete political action. Second, through Butler’s reinterpretation of Arendt’s political thinking, the notion of “action” is enriched by the dimension of vulnerability.

I seek to understand the relationship between human vulnerability and human rights as something more than a problem that respect for human rights solves. After characterizing vulnerability and noting that human rights are generally regarded as entitlements that respect the dignity of persons by securing their autonomous agency, I draw out the implications of these premises. I argue that human vulnerabilities are constitutive of the capacity for autonomous agency and therefore that the circumstances of respect for persons must include persons’ vulnerability to many sorts of harms. Given that the opportunity to lead one’s life in one’s own way—that is, the opportunity to exercise autonomous agency—is indispensable to human dignity, respect for persons entails respect for the vulnerability that underwrites autonomous agency. If so, rights-bearers are necessarily vulnerable subjects. I further defend this conception of rights-bearers by arguing that it comports with three types of human rights theory: agency-centered, needs-centered, and practice-based accounts of human rights.

Despite a shared recognition of the significant contribution of corporeality to normative phenomena such as agency, it is rare for Nietzsche scholarship on naturalism and agency to include explicit employment of so-called “new materialist” approaches to agency. In an effort to show the fecundity of such an employment, I apply Diana Coole’s notion of a spectrum of distributed agentic capacities to a reading of passages within Nietzsche’s genealogy of the subject. I suggest that doing so helps to emphasize the significant role of pre-personal and nonconscious corporeal processes in the emergence of the subject in Nietzsche’s texts; the contribution of these processes to agentic capacities; and the possibility of conceiving the agentic spectrum, in Nietzsche’s corpus, as a spectrum of acts of incorporation.

In this essay I examine the concept of the “event” in Heideggerian thought, with particular reference to the first volume of the Black Notebooks, which is contemporaneous with Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (1936–1938) and Notes III (dating from 1946–47) from the fourth volume. At issue are the concepts of “event” (Ereignis), “essential unfolding” (Wesung), and “expropriation” (Enteignis), which assume considerable importance in the mid-1930s. Through his treatment of the event, Heidegger reinterprets being as an alterity with respect to beings and to Dasein, in that being withdraws and conceals itself. Furthermore, I show a shift in Heidegger’s “disposition” (Stimmung) that occurs in Notes III, from an “attunement” that stresses decision to a way of thinking in terms of “releasing” and “thanking.” In these writings, Heidegger already makes use of the concept of “releasement” (Gelassenheit), which is usually associated with a later stage of his thought.

The past few years have seen a dramatic backlash against identity politics from academics such as Michael Sandel, Kwame Appiah, Mark Lilla, and Francis Fukuyama. In the vocabulary of identity conceptions, we can classify this as a reaction to a growing dissatisfaction with the perceived hollowness and ineffectiveness of “authenticity” that calls for a return to “sincerity”—or a “Political New Sincerity.” We argue that a third identity paradigm is in play as well, namely “profilicity.” This profile-based approach to understanding oneself, others, and the world has had a major impact on social and political life, and yet has gone largely unnoticed or otherwise been mis-diagnosed. Our analysis provides a critical reflection on the emergence of profilicity to pave the way for developing insights into our changing sociopolitical and inter-personal landscapes.