This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. (...) For most users, current LLMs are black boxes, i.e., for the most part, they lack data transparency and algorithmic transparency. They can, however, be phenomenologically and informationally transparent, in which case there is an interactional flow. Anthropomorphising and interactional flow can, in some users, create an attitude of (unwarranted) trust towards the output LLMs generate. We conclude this paper by drawing on the epistemology of trust and testimony to examine the epistemic implications of these dimensions. Whilst LLMs generally generate accurate responses, we observe two epistemic pitfalls. Ideally, users should be able to match the level of trust that they place in LLMs to the degree that LLMs are trustworthy. However, both their data and algorithmic opacity and their phenomenological and informational transparency can make it difficult for users to calibrate their trust correctly. The effects of these limitations are twofold: users may adopt unwarranted attitudes of trust towards the outputs of LLMs (which is particularly problematic when LLMs hallucinate), and the trustworthiness of LLMs may be undermined. (shrink)

Parto de uma conceitualização geral de como o problema do mal fora abordado ao longo da tradição filosófica e religiosa, enquanto problema ontológico e relativo, no mais das vezes, a uma teodiceia que busca explicar a existência do mal no mundo. Em seguida, abordo uma nova forma de se pensar o problema do mal através do pensamento idealista de Immanuel Kant, que movimentou a problemática em uma direção outra àquela anterior, ou seja, afirmando que o mal não era um problema (...) localizado na realidade, mas no sujeito enquanto ser dotado de moralidade, residindo na dimensão mais radical da natureza humana. Em Arendt, o mal deixa o plano do sujeito singular e passa a ser compreendido enquanto um fenômeno político. Para a autora, o mal não deve ser um fenômeno político, todavia com a ascensão dos movimentos totalitários e outros fenômenos de ruptura com o fio da tradição, esse problema passa a ocupar a dimensão da vida pública. Desta forma, o objetivo da autora é tentar compreender as condições para se pensar o mal enquanto fenômeno político, assim como aquilo que lhe fundamenta e garante legitimidade. O fio condutor deste artigo são as obras Origens do Totalitarismo (ARENDT, 2018) e o conjunto de ensaios publicados no período de 1930-54 (ARENDT, 2008). O produto da presente análise refere-se à experiência humana da solidão enquanto fundamento do mal na esfera política. (shrink)

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were (...) structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. (shrink)

The encounter of Alexander the Great with the Indian Brahmans or Oxydorkai/Oxydracae forms an important episode of the Alexander Romance as well as featuring in all the extant Alexander historians. The purpose of this paper is to consider how far the various accounts reflect genuine knowledge of India in the sources in which they are based, and to what extent the episode in the Alexander Romance diverges or adds to them and to what purpose. A future paper will consider the (...) development of the episode in later works, Geneva Papyrus inv. 271 andPalladius De gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus, as well as theCollatio Alexandri et Dindimi. (shrink)

Manuel Cruz launches a nuanced study of memory and forgetting, defining their forms and uses, political meanings, and social and historical implications. Memory is not an intrinsically positive phenomenon, he argues, but an impressionable and malleable one, used to advance a variety of agendas. Cruz focuses on five memory models: that which is inherently valuable; that which legitimizes the present; that which supports retributive justice; that which is essential to mourning; and that which elicits renunciation or revelation.

Het fascisme is uitgeroeid: wat rest zijn nog slechts schimmen. Maar de opkomst van extreem-rechtse partijen, die weliswaar doorgaans klein blijven, maar die niettemin van grote invloed zijn op de politieke agenda van de grotere partijen, duidt erop dat het gevaar voor de democratie nog niet is geweken. Ditmaal komt het niet van buitenaf, maar van binnenuit: wij leven in een tijd van zacht totalitarisme, van verslapping van moraal en wil, van passiviteit.

Unterschiedliche Szenarien, die neue Entdeckungen in der Genetik betreffen, bilden den Ausgangspunkt für diese Untersuchung. Um einen angemessenen Kontext zur Verfügung zu stellen, folgt nach einer kurzen Diskussion der schwierigen Beziehungen zwischen Philosophie und Medizin eine Reflexion über verschiedene Implikationen des neuen biologischen Wissens und der daraus resultierenden Technologien für die medizinische Praxis. Von besonderem Interesse sind dabei frühere Diskussionen dieser Implikationen von Genetikern, insbesondere im Hinblick auf eine Erneuerung der Evolutionstheorie und ihrer klinischen Applikationen sowie einen daraus hervorgehenden Disput (...) über in-vitro-Fertilisation, der den Ausgangspunkt für die gegenwärtigen Kontroversen über genetische Entdeckungen bildet. Danach werden einige zentrale Punkte angesprochen: Die Kontrolle über die Reproduktion des Menschen und neuerliche philosophische Debatten über die Signifikanz genetischer Entdeckungen für die philosophischen Fragen der Identität und des Rechts auf Privatheit. Danach wird die These aufgestellt, daß ein neues Modell, das der Molekularbiologie, sich im Bereich der Medizin ausgebreitet hat, das im Themenkreis von Ethik, Recht und Philosophie für das 21. Jahrhundert völlig neue Fragen aufwirft.Several scenarios involving new discoveries in genetics set the stage for an analysis. To provide a proper context, a brief discussion of the vexed relations between philosophy and medicine is followed by a reflection on several implications of new biological knowledge and its resulting technologies for medical practice. Of particular interest are earlier discussions by geneticists of these implications, especially for renewed assessments of evolution theory and clinical applications, and one resulting dispute, about in vitro fertilization, which sets the stage for current controversies occasioned by genetic discoveries. Attention is then given to several central issues: control over human reproduction and renewed philosophical disputes over the significance of genetic discoveries for philosophical questions of personal identity and privacy. It is then suggested that a new model, molecular biology, has come into place for medicine, presenting wholly novel questions for the twenty-first century in ethics, law and philosophy. (shrink)

Landschenkungsurkunden hethitischer Könige. By Christel Rüster and Gernot Wilhelm. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, Beiheft 4. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012. Pp. 271, 75 plts. €94.

Wollheim onderzoekt beeldenverering in de moderne seculiere samenleving vanuit een rationalistisch, psychologisch standpunt.

Name der Zeitschrift: Wittgenstein-Studien Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 27-56.

In the final scene of Michel Tournier’s postcolonial novel La Goutte d’or, the protagonist, Idriss, shatters the glass of a Cristobal & Co. storefront window while operating a jackhammer in the working-class Parisian neighbourhood on the Rue de la Goutte d’or. Glass fragments fly everywhere as the Parisian police arrive. In La Goutte d’or, Tournier explores the identity construction of Idriss through a discussion of the role that visual images play in the development of a twentieth-century consciousness of the “Other.” (...) At the beginning of the novel, a French tourist takes a photograph of Idriss during her visit to the Sahara. The boy’s quest to reclaim his stolen image leads him from the Sahara to Marseille, and finally to the Rue de la Goutte d’or in Paris. The Rue de la Goutte d’or remains one the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the city. In Tournier’s novel, the goutte d’or also corresponds to a symbolic object: a Berber jewel. It is the jewel that Idriss brings with him, but which he also subsequently loses upon his arrival in Marseille. From the very moment that the French tourist photographs him, a marginalization of Idriss’s identity occurs. Marginality, quite literally, refers to the spatial property of a location in which something is situated. Figuratively speaking, marginality suggests something that is on the edges or at the outer limits of social acceptability. In this essay, I explore the construction of the marginalized postcolonial self through an examination of the function of visual representation in the development of a postcolonial identity in La Goutte d’or. In the end, I conclude that the construction of a postcolonial identity is based upon fragmentation and marginalization, which ultimately leads its subject to create an identity based upon false constructions. (shrink)