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