.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
The argument about artificial intelligence turns almost entirely on whether the machine thinks. Derrida's work on the archive, on writing, on the trace and on responsibility pulls the question back a step: once machines begin to write and to remember, what becomes of the author, the subject and responsibility?
World Desk · 28 August 2026
Augustine died on 28 August 430 in Hippo, a city then under siege. Sixteen centuries later, a discovery announced this year has brought two previously unknown sermons of his to light. Goethe was born on the same day in 1749.
The final volume of a trilogy thirty years in the making turns on a single question: is going on living a principle, or an opportunity that depends on circumstances? Earlier this year the French philosopher put the same question to the limits of medicine.
The Oxford handbook edited by Shannon Vallor shows that the philosophy of technology is no longer a sideline. Running from Heidegger and Ellul to Don Ihde's postphenomenology and the ethics of algorithms, it draws the map of a discipline that has come of age.
Don Ihde, the founder of postphenomenology, died in 2024, three days after his ninetieth birthday. The memorial conference held at Stony Brook, and the discussion that followed it, suggest that his theory of mediation has acquired an unexpected currency in the age of artificial intelligence.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770, 256 years ago today. The system that read history as the unfolding of reason has spent two centuries being both the most closely followed and the most flatly rejected philosophy there is.
'Being and Nothingness' is a chapter from Quentin Meillassoux's 1997 doctoral thesis, which has never been published as a book. The text shows the first form of the principle of factiality, which twenty years later would sit at the heart of After Finitude — and it takes that form in an argument with Derrida.
Quentin Meillassoux
Goldstein's new book follows a single drive: the need to matter. On her account that need lies behind humanity's greatest achievements and behind its most stubborn afflictions — loneliness, polarisation and extremism alike.
Rebecca Goldstein
