Online research in philosophy

A. M. Turing argued that there was ‘little point in trying to make a ‘thinking machine’ more human by dressing it up in ... artificial flesh’. We should, instead, draw ‘a fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man’. For over fifty years, drawing this line has meant disregarding the role flesh plays in our intellectual capacities. Correspondingly, intelligence has been defined in terms of the algorithms that both men and machines can perform. I would like to raise some doubts about this paradigm in AI research. Intelligence, I believe, does not just involve the working of algorithms. It is founded on flesh’s ability to move itself, to feel itself, and to engage in the body projects that accompanied our learning a language. This implies that to copy intelligence--i.e., produce an artificial version of it--the flesh that forms its basis must also be reproduced.

A Critical Sense brings together, in their own words, the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, this book offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal Radical Philosophy . The intellectuals at the center of these debates are: Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, Drucilla Cornell, Axel Honneth, Istvan Meszaros, Edward Said, Renata Salecl, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Cornel West, and Slavoj Zizek. A Critical Sense will throw new, and often surprising, light on the intellectual debates of our time.

This volumeincludes work from some of the most prominentcontemporary scholars in the humanities.

A philosophical exploration of the ideal of intellectual integrity drawing on Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical Bildungsroaman, The Way of All Flesh; and relating this to C.S. Peirce's idea of the scientific attitude and Percy Bridgman's reflections on the conditions needed for this ideal to flourish.