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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
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.
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
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Mary Wollstonecraft died on this date in 1797, eleven days after giving birth. Georges Bataille was born on it a century later, and Paul Virilio died on it in 2018. Three lives with almost nothing in common, and one shared preoccupation: where the line is drawn, and who draws it.
Georges Bataille, Mary Wollstonecraft, Paul Virilio
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
A paper accepted for CHI 2026 argues that human-computer interaction has settled for studying artificial intelligence as a 'tool', and puts labour process theory, from Marx to Braverman, back on the table. The question is not a technical one: whose skill is the machine absorbing?
The twentieth century turned Marx into the name of a political programme. The twenty-first is reading him again as an analyst: alienation, commodity fetishism, ecology, republican freedom. The question 'who owns artificial intelligence?' is that reading's examination paper.
The thirty-first annual meeting of the North American Sartre Society will be held online on 23-24 October 2026. Its theme carries existentialism's most familiar concepts — bad faith, the look, freedom and situation — into the digital, this time among avatars and algorithms.
Moses Mendelssohn was born on 6 September 1729; Donna Haraway on 6 September 1944. One argued that a state has no business inspecting its citizens' beliefs; the other dismantled the figure of the pure human subject with a cyborg. Two hundred and fifteen years apart, both were asking who gets admitted to the community of reason.
