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Strip away the talk of minds and machines and a plainer question sits underneath artificial intelligence: who owns the compute, the data and the models, and who keeps the returns. The labour evidence is more modest than the valuations assume, and the disagreement among economists is real.
David Harvey, Karl Marx, Shoshana Zuboff
Martin Heidegger was born at Messkirch on 26 September 1889; Walter Benjamin died at Portbou on 26 September 1940, a day after crossing the Pyrenees on foot. T. S. Eliot was born on the date in 1888, Hans Reichenbach in 1891. Four accounts of time: a philosopher who joined the party, a critic who fled it, a poet, a physicist.
Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin
The claim that platforms expose a society's collective unconscious is unfalsifiable and unnecessary. A smaller claim survives contact with the evidence, and it is the more disturbing one: what billions of small reactions register is not what a society hides, but what its ranking systems can be made to select for.
Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Rancière, Émile Durkheim, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord
Heidelberg University, its Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the city have named Seyla Benhabib the 2026 laureate of the 25,000-euro Karl Jaspers Prize, citing a life's work on justice, rights and migration and a voice raised, in the jury's words, 'against the evil spirit of an age'. The ceremony is on 29 April 2027.
Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt
Susan Neiman wants the word 'evil' back. Byung-Chul Han wants 'respect'. Žižek and Butler think the words on offer are traps. Habermas, in a volume finished before his death, denied that anything was lost. The year's other book list, read as one argument.
Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Neiman
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Louis Althusser built the concept of interpellation to protect a scientific reading of 'Capital'. The science was abandoned; the street scene went everywhere. A reckoning with what survives, what does not, and the killing that the profession spent forty years learning how to describe.
Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, 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
For half a century the Marxist geographer has argued one thing: capital does not simply move through space, it builds space, and it escapes its own crises by rearranging what it has built. From Haussmann's Paris to the data centres of rural Louisiana, an assessment of the idea and of what it cannot do.
Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey
Two meetings the autumn diary has so far missed: a centenary symposium on Foucault at the University of Pennsylvania on 24 and 25 September, and the North American Sartre Society's 31st annual meeting, held on Zoom in October on artificial intelligence and digital existence. Plus a verified survey of what follows to the end of November.
Yuk Hui
