Nazenin Ruso explains where and why he agrees with Derrida’s approach to texts. Jacques Derrida was the best-known French philosopher of the 80s and 90s, yet many find it difficult to grasp his ideas. He asked complex philosophical questions about texts and textuality. He invented deconstructionism, which emphasizes the necessary incompleteness of texts. That is […]
A Position On Derrida Read More »
Review of Seb Franklin, The Digitally DisposedMarc Kohlbry As our tech overlords flee a blighted planet, a scholarly consensus is taking shape around the fallout of unchecked innovation and the subsequent need for ‘algorithmic justice’. This consensus is perhaps distilled by Shalini Kantayya’s award-winning 2020 documentary Coded Bias, which tells the story of Joy Buolamwini,
Race after information-value Read More »
Review of Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History Hannah Proctor The second volume of Peter Weiss’s epic historical novel The Aesthetics of Resistance opens in Paris in 1938. Recently defeated international brigade fighters in the Spanish Civil War, the unnamed narrator and his dejected comrades have taken up temporary residence in a grand building made available by its
Review of Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in light of notions of form and individuation Gus Hewlett Simondon’s longest and most philosophically ambitious text has finally arrived in English, in a fine translation by Taylor Adkins. Individuation in light of notions of form and information was originally submitted in 1958 as Simondon’s thèse principale, alongside his thèse secondaire, On the mode of existence of
Danelle Gallo compares the ecstacies of Georges Bataille and Yves Klein. French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) were passionately fascinated with death, eroticism, the sacred, and sacrifice. Bataille, a fluent and often controversially graphic philosopher, related the erotic to the sacred through the imminence of death. Yves Klein, the so-called
Ecstasy Through Self-Destruction Read More »
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being rolled out all around the world to help make decisions in our lives, whether it’s loan decisions by banks, medical diagnoses, or US law enforcement predicting a criminal’s likelihood of re-offending. Yet many AI systems are black boxes: no one understands how they work. This has led to a demand for “explainable AI”,
To build a machine, one must know what its parts are and how they fit together. To understand the machine, one needs to know what each part does and how it contributes to its function. In other words, one should be able to explain the “mechanics” of how it works. According to a philosophical approach called mechanism,
Can machines be self-aware? New research explains how this could happen Read More »
“[The] city is a spatial figure of time in which present, past and future come together. It is, at times, a cause for astonishment and, at others, for remembrance or expectation […]. In this sense, the city is both an illusion and an allusion.” (Marc Augé, “Pour une anthropologie de la mobilité”). We head to
The philosopher Marc Augé defined our cities. Now it’s in our hands to make them homey Read More »
In Moral Progress in Dark Times, German philosopher Markus Gabriel makes a case for a new enlightenment based on universal values, arguing that the democratic law-based state is a valuable vehicle for encouraging this “moral progress”. The aims of his book are admirable, but Gabriel is only partially successful in explaining what the new enlightenment might
In a recent TED talk titled No Philosophy, No Humanity, author Roger Sutcliffe asked the audience whether a flagpole was a place. Around half the audience said yes, the other said no. He went on to describe the response a nine-year-old gave him to that question: to me a flagpole is not a place, but to