Sublime

Today you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is

no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. But that point is mismade in the statement that human beings d

Papert saw that Jean Piaget, his old mentor, had got it wrong. As children grew up, they did not move from physical learning through imaginary learning and on to formal or rational learning, leaving the earlier modes behind as they ‘outgrew’ them. On the contrary, imagining and reasoning added to observing and experimenting, making practical learni

From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical thi

Aron a dû dire quelque chose du genre : les philosophes traditionnels partaient souvent d’axiomes abstraits ou de théories, mais les phénoménologues allemands s’appuyaient sur la vie telle qu’ils l’expérimentaient, d’un instant à l’autre.

Le danger existe, d'Alain à Aron, en passant par Camus, de ne pas trouver le bon équilibre et de sacrifier la philosophie au fait divers – le contraire ne posant pas de problème.

an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do

"No wonder that men who live day in and day out with such machines and become dependent on them begin to believe that men are merely machines. They are reflecting what they themselves have become."

The architects of artificial intelligence still have no idea how to build a conscious self the way you might build an automobile engine—piece by piece and part by part, until the system is ready to be given a jolt of energy and spring into its work. Instead we are building machines that simulate the output of a human mind—writing, coding, poetry, e