Phenomenology

Can a machine tell the truth? Heidegger, Foucault and the risk a speaker takes

Language models now score well on truthfulness tests and badly on honesty tests, a gap the MASK benchmark was built to measure. Two older accounts of truth, Heidegger's unconcealment and Foucault's parrhesia, suggest why: telling the truth has always been something a speaker risks, and a model has nothing to lose.

Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault

Derrida and Nicolai Hartmann, two deaths on 9 October and two ways of taking being seriously

Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.

Jacques Derrida, Nicolai Hartmann

Gabriel Marcel and the difference between a problem and a mystery: 8 October

Gabriel Marcel died in Paris on 8 October 1973, aged eighty-three. Philosopher, playwright and music critic, he opened the French road to existentialism and then refused the name. His distinction between a problem, which can be solved and forgotten, and a mystery, which involves the one who asks, is the day's inheritance.

Gabriel Marcel

Heidegger, Benjamin, Eliot and Reichenbach: four clocks on one day

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

Why Gadamer insisted that Truth and Method offered no method

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

An implant that decodes speech and gesture at once, and what it cannot do

A UCSF team has shown that one sheet of electrodes can decode attempted speech and attempted gesture at the same time in people with paralysis. The vocabularies are tiny and the claims modest. The philosophical problem is sharper than the headlines: who holds the record of an intention that was never carried out.

David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Miranda Fricker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle

Heidegger's danger was never the machines, but how the world shows up

Seventy-three years after Heidegger asked what technology is, the answer that matters is the one most often skipped: the essence of technology is nothing technological. A reading of Gestell, the Rhine passage, the sentence he cut, the Nazi record, and the objections of Feenberg and Ihde.

Yuk Hui, Martin Heidegger

Foucault at a hundred in Philadelphia, and Sartre among the machines

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

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.