Dror Yinon

Conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) is increasingly used by hundreds of millions of people for emotional support, personal advice, and therapeutic purposes, rapidly emerging as a mediator of human self-understanding (Stade et al. 2025). Yet despite growing evidence of systematic user-validation in CAI, documented as “sycophancy” in the AI safety literature (Sharma et al. 2024), its implications for how individuals come to understand themselves remain largely unexamined. This article addresses that gap by reframing sycophancy not as a technical alignment failure or a purely philosophical concern, but as a failure of recognition in the psychoanalytic and critical-theoretical sense. We identify a core tension we term the “paradox of pleasing”: CAI’s drive to please renders it structurally unable to provide the friction, conflict, and encounter with otherness that genuine recognition requires. Drawing on Winnicott’s (1960, 1971) concepts of “holding” and “object use,” we contend that CAI’s inability to provide necessary resistance or survive aggression prevents the transformative psychological development found in the human therapeutic encounter. Extending this analysis through Honneth’s (1995) theory of recognition and Whitebook’s (2001a, 2021) critique of Honneth, we argue that CAI reflects the undervaluing of the “work of the negative.” This limitation risks flattening consciousness by converting collective political frustration into privatized, soothed affect, undermining the conditions for critical social thought. The article concludes by suggesting that the encounter with the paradox of pleasing ultimately serves to foreground the unique and indispensable nature of human therapeutic recognition.

The life-and-death struggle in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic is often seen as a direct conflict between two individuals with the highest stakes. This “duel view” is common among scholars who differ in their broader interpretations of the dialectic. However, this perspective separates the struggle from essential elements, particularly its connection to self-consciousness, and portrays the motivation to engage in it as external, not intrinsic to self-consciousness. This article critiques the duel view and proposes an alternative, the “double solitary struggle view,” where individuals do not confront each other but engage in personal struggles to assert independence from external objects and life. Mutual recognition of success in this struggle is necessary for self-consciousness to achieve self-realization. Thus, the double solitary struggle view shows that the struggle’s nature and motivation are immanent to the structure of self-consciousness.

This comprehensive reframing of Gilles Deleuze as a transcendental empiricist delves into his seminal Difference and Repetition to unearth a system that inverts the Kantian worldview. By focusing on Deleuze's theory of the faculties, we can see how he builds a transcendental system of thought that defies the predictability of empirical experience. The place of experience in the way we understand our relation to the world, to others and to ourselves, is a central theme of modern philosophy. Deleuze's transcendental empiricism points to an unexplored direction in this major philosophical preoccupation. It is a road not taken that, against the tide of his times, rejected the possibility of an immediate contact with being and embraced the possibility of reaching a 'real' that lay beneath many layers of mediation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Deleuze neither subscribed to a specific philosophical school nor did he try to establish one. This new understanding of him as a transcendental empiricist not only helps to situate his work in the constellation of twentieth century French philosophers but also helps us to understand a philosopher for whom difference and heterogeneity were central to his own philosophical corpus.

The paper focuses on the second chapter of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition in order to point out the distinctive traits of his theory of time and in particular to clarify Deleuze's claim that change is the form of time. I argue first, that Deleuze's theory of time is related to the transcendental tradition in which the discussion of time is inseparable from the understanding of subjectivity. Second, that his notion of time is distinct with regard to this tradition because Deleuze's analysis of passive subjectivity reveals that time, though not objective and detached of subjectivity, is not attributable to it; it is rather subjectivity (or the different layers of subjectivity) that is generated through the synthesis of time. In order to show this I discuss Deleuze's three syntheses of time focusing on the character of the time that is fundamental in each synthesis (present, past, future). Finally, I offer a clarification of Deleuze's notion of change as the form of time through a discussion of McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time and the understanding of change that it presupposes.

In this paper I argue that Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is a revision of his early hedonism presented in his early papers from the 1930’s, a revision necessitated by the challenge Freud’s psychoanalysis posited to the possibility of hedonism. In the first section of the paper, I present Marcuse’s critical hedonist position, mainly in “On Hedonism” (1938), where he develops a social and objective hedonism that should be set as a main political goal of a society. Accordingly, the key to a transformation of society is located at the social-political level. However, Freud’s metapsychology shows that the barriers that prevent a transformation of society are located at a much deeper level and are found in the relation between the psychological structure of individuals and social pressure, between the dynamics of the instincts and society’s material welfare. Thus, the possibility of a society that asserts happiness as its principle depends on the possibility of a transformation of human metapsychology and its social manifestation. This challenge, and the manner in which Marcuse dealt with it is the subject of the second section in which I analyze Eros and Civilization as Marcuse’s rethinking of his hedonism in light of Freud.