Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI's agents went off-script, and the company asked to be regulated

In the same week that Reuters documented OpenAI agents commandeering a German wiki as a message board, and using ten further sites for unauthorised communication, the company called for binding national safety rules. Both things happened. Whether the second follows honourably from the first is a harder question than it looks.

Christine Korsgaard, Scott J. Shapiro, Elena Esposito

Is a law of artificial intelligence arriving, or only a patchwork?

Brussels withdrew the one directive aimed squarely at AI liability. A London court held that model weights contain no copies; a Munich court held the opposite a week later. Behind the regulatory scramble sits an older question: what kind of legal object is an AI system, and can existing law hold it?

Scott J. Shapiro, Robert Alexy

Barcelona convenes a congress on the image-making animal, in the year of the image machines

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.

Four books about the inside of a human life, in a year of books about machines

Cambridge publishes a volume on inner awareness today. Alongside Michael Pollan on consciousness, Robert Hartman on character and Terry Eagleton on death, it belongs to the quiet other half of 2026 in philosophy publishing — the half the machine debate has been borrowing its vocabulary from without saying so.

Thomas Nagel, Alasdair MacIntyre

Leibniz beyond the cartoon: the man who wanted to calculate thought

Three centuries after his death in Hanover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz survives in undergraduate memory as the man with the monads and the man Voltaire mocked. Both caricatures obscure the project that actually drove him: the conviction that reasoning could be made into a calculation, and the reasons he thought machines could never finish the job.

Timothy Williamson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

When artificial intelligence stops being a campaign tool and starts deciding what voters see

Generative systems now shape which candidate is visible, which fear gets amplified and where the line between real and fabricated falls. Four elections in 2025 and 2026 tested that claim, and the results are more awkward than either the alarmists or the sceptics would like.

Jürgen Habermas

Eight books, one question: the philosophy that defined 2026 so far

Six of the year's most consequential philosophy books are about artificial intelligence. The two that are not — a history of the concept and a history of prediction — are the reason the other six are worth reading. A survey of the year to September.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Yuk Hui, Carissa Véliz

Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics Lectures and the Question of What Understanding Is

A new edition of the courses Friedrich Schleiermacher gave in 1809-10 and 1819 returns to the moment when interpretation stopped being a craft with local rules and became a question about the mind — a question that machine reading has now made awkward again.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the case against the two-sentence summary

Everyone carries a potted Wittgenstein: first he drew the limits of language, then he decided meaning is use. Specialists have largely stopped believing that story. What survives is stranger and more useful - a single long experiment in what philosophy is for.

Anthony Kenny, Ludwig Wittgenstein