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Generative systems have not answered the question of whether a machine can be an artist. They have made it impossible to leave the question vague. A survey of what Danto, Benjamin, Barthes, Collingwood, Dewey, Goodman, Adorno, Heidegger and Boden actually help with, and where the courts have got ahead of the philosophers.
Martin Heidegger, Arthur Danto, Walter Benjamin, Margaret Boden
On 18 September 1944 the University of Chicago Press published The Road to Serfdom in an edition of 2,000 copies. On 18 September 1985 Monroe Beardsley died. Between them they left two arguments that order and meaning need no single authorising mind — and the same date supplies the objections.
Monroe Beardsley, F. H. Bradley
Archive research, pedagogy, political theory, film and literature: across sixty years Jacques Rancière has restated one claim in five different materials. Equality is not a destination but a premise, and politics is the moment someone demonstrates it. The claim has costs, and his critics have named them precisely.
Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Louis Althusser
Hans-Georg Gadamer spent four decades correcting readers of his own title. Truth and Method, published in 1960, argues that the humanities were reaching truth long before the natural sciences arrived to tell them they were not. What survives of the argument, including its quarrels with Habermas and Derrida, and what it can and cannot say about talking to a machine.
Jürgen Habermas, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer
The Rutgers philosopher takes the field's most watched award in philosophy of mind, and will give the Nicod Lectures in Paris this autumn. Her subject is the part of communication that is never actually asserted: metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, insinuation, and the perspectives that organise what we notice.
David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elena Esposito, Elisabeth Camp
Eight books published or due between now and the end of December, none of them covered in this week's two surveys. Read together, they show a discipline that has stopped asking whether machines can think and started asking what thinking is worth — and a logic revival almost nobody has noticed.
Byung-Chul Han, Giorgio Agamben, David Chalmers
Eduard Hanslick was born on this date in 1825, James Jeans in 1877, Theodor Adorno in 1903. Each spent a career on the same awkward question: how far an interpreter may go beyond what the object actually says. In 2001 the date itself became a name, and two philosophers fell out over whether it named anything.
Jürgen Habermas
The Hispanic Society of Philosophical Anthropology meets at UIC Barcelona from 30 September on the theme Homo pictor: Art, Imagination and Creation. The phrase is Hans Jonas's, from 1961. The timing is nobody's accident, and the discipline doing the convening barely exists in English.
I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979. With C. K. Ogden he wrote the book that pulled the theory of meaning out of philosophy and into the reading of actual sentences — and then proved, with a famous experiment on his own students, how badly trained readers understand what they read.
