Abstract Belief in malevolent global conspiracies is often treated as a defeater for philosophical seriousness. Engaging with Lee Basham’s defense of conspiracy theorizing and Genia Schönbaumsfeld’s critique, I make two claims. First, we must distinguish the ambitious multi-institutional schemes of non-total malevolent global conspiracies, which nevertheless remain evidentially vulnerable, from conspiracy theories that are self-sealing. Only the latter are epistemically vacuous. Second, properly understood, Cartesian doubt is a norm-governed temporary device for re-ordering reasons, a standing commitment to the view that everything can be doubted. The assumed kinship between radical skepticism and self-sealing conspiracy theories, therefore, overstates their structural similarity.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a central focus of ethical deliberation in reports, guidelines, and official statements issued by technology companies, governments, and international organizations. This paper analyzes five influential documents representing the broad field of AI ethics as a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’: a collectively held, institutionalized, and publicly performed vision of the future. It argues that this imaginary transforms ethics into a technology of governance through which governments, international organizations, and corporations present AI as an inevitable, controllable, and desirable future. The paper critically examines the limitations of this approach, particularly its claims to universality, which treat both AI and ethics as abstract, cultureless objects detached from time and place. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and philosophy, the paper outlines alternative pathways toward historically, geographically, and politically situated forms of ethics, in which technological futures remain collective, contested, and open rather than confined to trajectories presented as inevitable.
Abstract The digital revolution has changed the living conditions for everybody on a global scale as hardly any living humans are untouched by information and communication technologies and their exposure to the World Wide Web. Just as the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries radically reorganized human life, the contemporary digital revolution redistributes power, reshapes labor markets, and alters the texture of everyday experience. In light of such conditions, philosophy must take the task of assessing, critiquing, and understanding this new reality by recalibrating its tradition of thought and innovating new means of thinking about the human condition in the digital world. We argue that the history of philosophy contains a reservoir of thinking which can be recalibrated to confront pressing contemporary epistemological and axiological problems. Furthermore, philosophy may help us orientate ourselves amidst the rapid technological changes as philosophy does not offer a technical solution, but innovations in understanding human lives. Philosophy offers many forms of engaging with the predicaments of our digital world and the special issue at hand is a good example. In the seven contributions pillars for philosophical reflection, deliberation, and dispute are erected by recourse to the history of philosophy and by philosophical interpretations of works of art, as well as analyses of documents and practices that prevail in the digital world.
Abstract Read as an inclusio, a ‘growing up’ story, the Phaedrus illustrates the risks and benefits of writing. Accepting writing’s mere semblance of wisdom and knowledge threatens de-skilling , our failing to cultivate the wisdom and ethical judgment— phronēsis —required for self-knowledge and contentment ( eudaimonia ): writing can also remind . Young Phaedrus grows up by learning the strengths and limits of both literacy and orality in order to use these tools properly. These lessons are vitally central to our own efforts to grow up in our AI-saturated age. Reviewing the origins and machineries of both classic and generative AI illustrates their strengths and limits, teaching us their proper use as complements to human judgment as computationally intractable. A concrete example of using LLMs in research and writing exploits their strengths while sustaining the cultivation of judgment and contentment. Socrates’s indirect pedagogy is exemplary for contemporary teachers guiding students learning to grow up with AI.
Abstract Does digital technology liberate or imprison? This article confronts Heidegger’s diagnosis of technology as enframing —the reduction of beings to calculable resources—by asking whether digital culture is doomed to confinement or capable of opening unforeseen freedoms. We argue that the answer hinges on where agency is located: a humanist ‘virtual reality’ perspective risks deepening enframing, while acknowledging non-human agents allows technology to exceed calculative closure. Turning to Heidegger’s notion of art as a ‘saving power,’ we propose analyzing avant-garde practices through two central Heideggerian strategies for revealing technology’s essence—brokenness and alienation—thereby seeing them as revelatory modes that dismantle habitual functions and disclose unthought potentials. Drawing on Graham Harman’s tool-being, yet rejecting his radical autonomy of objects, we point to the concept of ‘real virtuality’ (DeLanda) as a material potentiality exposed by art. Through Marcel Duchamp, surrealism, Fluxus, and Situationism, we trace how avant-garde art models ways whereby digital culture might escape enframing.
Abstract This essay offers a definition of fundamentalists. It argues that fundamentalists are people who reject, return, and replace (RRR). They reject and replace extant ideals, returning (or taking themselves to return) to ideals that are more ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ to the past. There are three key implications of this definition. First, fundamentalism can but needn’t be religious or political: RRR includes religious and political fundamentalism, but also allows (e.g.) organic farming, unplugging, and living off the grid to be classified as fundamentalist. Second, the analysis is non-pejorative, in the sense that it recognizes that fundamentalists can but needn’t be viciously intolerant or viciously closed-minded. It thus includes vicious forms of fundamentalism while also allowing for cases in which fundamentalists are not vicious. Third, the essay argues that fundamentalism and extremism are distinct: extremists can but needn’t be fundamentalists, and fundamentalists can but needn’t be extremists.
Abstract The focus of this article is the psychological allure of automation, as well as the anticipated cognitive and social consequences of heavily mediated and automated societies. The article approaches these themes through an in-depth analysis of E. M. Forster’s rather dystopian vision of a fully automated society in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops.” The analysis puts Forster’s vision in conversation with contemporary automation trends, for example, addictive designs and data-driven personalization. A series of potential cognitive and social harms are treated as stemming not from automation or mediation in itself but from, e.g., a loss of temporal, navigational, and social conditions for integrating our mediated experiences in a way that supports our epistemic world orientation. Thus, while our current automation trends differ from Forster’s 1909 vision, they might pose systematic and somewhat predictable threats to our cognitive, social, and political ecologies.
Abstract This paper investigates the moral agency of what I call ‘white terror wolves,’ or extremists responsible for violent lone attacks committed in the name of white supremacist ideology. Examples of white terror wolves are Anders Breivik (Norway), Dylann Storm Roof (USA), Brenton Tarrant (Australia), John Earnest (USA), Patrick Wood Crusius (USA), and Stephan Balliet (Germany). Government actors and the media often describe these perpetrators as being mentally ill or brainwashed—a perspective that risks misconstruing mental illness instead of white extremism as the key driver for domestic terrorism. This paper contests this perspective by taking seriously how white terror wolves take ownership of and responsibility for their acts of terrorism. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy, the paper examines how white terror wolves exercise their moral agency. The analysis proceeds in three parts. First, it describes the role of white terror wolves in white extremism and the pernicious framing of their perpetrator identity as being mentally ill. Second, and following MacIntyre’s work, it outlines a conception of moral agency that is relevant to these cases. Third, it interrogates how white terror wolves exercise their moral agency to the point of moral failure.
In a world increasingly shaped by algorithms and data, the ethical dilemmas of AI development are no longer abstract; they are immediate and unavoidable. Frameworks like the EU AI Act place increasing demands on tech professionals to operationalize legal and ethical principles into actionable practices. This article emphasizes the need for data scientists, positioned at the intersection of technological innovation and societal impact, to develop techno-moral competences that enable them to navigate the ethical dimensions of their work responsibly. Drawing on virtue ethics, Iris Murdoch’s concept of ‘unselfing,’ and insights from post-phenomenology, it explores how data scientists can cultivate the ability to perceive the world in a just and context-sensitive manner, particularly by recognizing how their tools mediate reality and shape their moral responsibilities. The article formulates several strategies to align their practices with societal values and play an active role in shaping the ethical governance of AI systems.
The ultimate aim of this issue is to contribute to the analytical review of critical theories of biological and social reproduction and to propose a concept of reproduction justifiable in normative and operative terms within the framework of moral and political philosophy. The ambiguity and plasticity of the concept of ‘reproduction’ and the generic use made of it in the social and human sciences, critical social and political philosophy and political demands, calls for a comprehensive critical-analytical clarification at least at the levels of the processes of biological reproduction of individual subjects, the processes of socioeconomic reproduction, and the political and institutional reproduction of the social order as a whole. The essays collected here are intended as a contribution in this regard, focused in a theoretical approach to reproduction inspired by current critical theories, deliberative democracy and the category of the public sphere, which allows us to deal with social categories such as reproduction without essentialist presuppositions. The normative horizon points to a democratic and emancipatory conception of reproductive relations.
This article presents a philosophical approach to social work, specifically through mentorship programs aimed at helping young individuals in vulnerable positions. Integrating existential phenomenology with practical philosophy, it explores how these mentorships can act as experiences for personal and societal transformation, addressing both ethical and existential dimensions. For instance, mentors may develop a renewed sense of moral responsibility and self-understanding, while mentees can experience a reorientation toward trust, education, or social participation. The study articulates the need for a deeper philosophical grounding of mentorship practices, responding to emerging trends in voluntary social work that emphasize organic, self-driven engagements over traditional models of mentoring. Building on a case study, the findings advocate for a model of mentorship that emphasizes authenticity, ethical engagement, and reciprocal personal growth, posited within an evolving theoretical framework that seeks to align mentorship practices with existential social philosophies.
Abstract Will artificial decision-making support ( dms ) erode human capacity for moral decision-making and human ability to think critically about morality? The question is empirical, but also ethical. To provide a framework for investigating human morality vis-à-vis dms , I will examine the self-proclaimed Kantian utilitarian Richard M. Hare’s two-level theory of critical and intuitive moral thinking. Hare’s proposition may offer a constructive approach to probe the consequences of dms for human moral thinking. I consider Hare’s notion of an archangel and a fanatic as moral agents. An amoralist approach is briefly examined. I conclude that dms will not leave humans without moral agency, although it may lure human beings into evading responsibility by leaving high-stake moral decisions to machines. Hopefully, critical moral thinking will retain moral autonomy in the age of artificial intelligence.
Jane Bennett has developed a distinctive form of materialism that she terms ‘vital materialism.’ This ontology serves as the foundation for the ecological politics she advances in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). In this work, Bennett offers critical assessments of several earlier philosophers of nature, among them Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose conception of nature she regards as akin to her own. My paper examines the extent and limits of this kinship by comparing Bennett’s vital materialism with the ontology articulated in Merleau-Ponty’s Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1956–1960) —lectures that laid the groundwork for his final book, The Visible and the Invisible . To determine whether Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of nature may be understood as a form of materialism, I also analyze the interpretations that both Bennett and Merleau-Ponty offer of the philosophies of nature proposed by Immanuel Kant, Hans Driesch, and Henri Bergson.
The commodification of data traces of online activities is central to the digital economy. The result is a ‘surveillance capitalism’ based on collaborations between states and private technology companies: states recommend private companies as stewards of citizens’ data, thus appealing to citizens to trust tech companies to manage their data in a just and trustworthy manner. We adopt a Kantian view to analyze this recommendation, which is founded on a pragmatic relation of trust between states and tech companies. Our analysis shows how the EU regulatory framework is based on self-management of data and guided by principles of transparency, accountability, and protection of privacy, on one hand, and of the free flow of data in the single market on the other. This leads most citizens into a malevolent passive attitude of trust, what Kant would call ‘lazy trust.’ The paper calls for principled regulations more conducive to moral trust in the digital world, particularly regarding data extraction practices.
This paper engages with questions of agency and atmospheres, in a revivification of the paper “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” published in glq in 2015. The abstract of the published paper reads: “Drawing on a disparate set of naturalcultural phenomena from regenerative biology, quantum field theory, and queer and trans theories that include lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, bioelectricity, monstrosity, trans rage, virtual particles, and errant pathways, this article is about the materiality of political imageries and the possibilities for making queer alliance with nature’s nonessentialist nature. In particular, it makes an argument for the radically deconstructive, queer, and trans nature of nature, including nature’s own engagement with materialist practices of imagining.”
