Edoardo Mattei

This article argues that personal identity is constituted at what it terms “Level A” through subjective intentionality, narrative self-projection, and the exercise of moral freedom, and that artificial intelligence operates primarily at “Level B,” the algorithmically mediated plane of social recognition. The confusion between these two planes generates false expectations about AI, obscures human responsibility in the transformation of structures, and misconceives the irreducible specificity of identity self-constitution. The article articulates Level B into three qualitatively distinct planes, the visibility plane, the ambition plane, and the emotional plane, each with its own mechanisms of action and specific modalities of influence on Level A. Drawing on Thomistic participated agency, Searle’s irreducibility of first-person subjectivity, and Honneth’s theory of recognition, it argues that the Level A/Level B distinction reflects a real ontological difference that the extended mind framework cannot capture, and that digital colonization, the progressive erosion of Level A by the three planes of Level B, is a reversible pathology, not a permanent condition.

Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind theory and its parity principle constitute a foundational reference in the philosophical debate on the relationship between mind and technological artefacts. This article argues that generative artificial intelligence represents a historically unprecedented artefact that the parity principle is structurally unable to describe, and that the framework of Participated Agency (PA) offers superior explanatory power for two specific reasons: the inversion of the causal direction between subject and artefact, and the distinction between cognitive functions originally internal and subsequently externalized, on the one hand, and consequences produced on the agent by the artefact, on the other. The article further shows how the subdivision of the algorithmic mediation plane into three levels—the visibility plane, the ambition plane, and the emotional plane—provides an explanatory granularity that is ontologically irreducible to the extended mind framework. The paper concludes by arguing that PA is not merely an alternative to the extended mind but its genuine supersession, in the precise sense of a superior explanatory capacity with respect to the specific phenomena of contemporary generative AI.

«Sarà molto difficile scoprire la presenza di Dio nell'IA». Con questa affermazione, pronunciata nell'estate del 2025, Leone XIV ha posto alla teologia cristiana una domanda che non ammette risposte generiche. Agency Partecipata e Tomismo Digitale nasce come risposta sistematica a questa provocazione magisteriale: non nel tentativo di rispondere al posto del Pontefice, ma di fornire le categorie concettuali senza le quali qualsiasi discernimento ecclesiale rischia di restare privo di fondamento ontologico. L'intelligenza artificiale non è un martello né una persona. Non è strumento inerte né agente autonomo: è un mediatore attivo che partecipa all'azione umana trasformandola dall'interno, pur rimanendo ontologicamente subordinato all'intelligenza dotata di intelletto e volontà. Questo è il nucleo della agency partecipata, categoria teologica originale che Edoardo Mattei elabora a partire dalla metafisica tomista della partecipazione, integrandola con gli strumenti delle Science and Technology Studies. Ne derivano il concetto di machine habitus, ovvero la sedimentazione algoritmica di disposizioni culturali, e la distinzione tra strutture di peccato digitale e strutture di grazia: criteri che permettono di valutare le configurazioni tecnologiche secondo la loro capacità di promuovere o oscurare la vocazione integrale della persona. Il volume percorre quattro sezioni tematiche, dai fondamenti genealogici del rapporto tra logos e computazione fino alle implicazioni ecclesiologiche e pastorali, attraverso un'analisi che integra rigore filosofico, metodo sociologico e teologia sistematica. Un contributo destinato a teologi, filosofi e operatori pastorali impegnati nel discernimento delle trasformazioni culturali del nostro tempo.

The growing pervasiveness of digital technologies in human life requires moral reflection that transcends the boundaries of design ethics and algorithmic regulation. Starting from the analogy with ecological sin and grounding itself in the doctrine of virtues, this study proposes a theological-moral framework for technological action. The analysis focuses on defining technological sin and elaborating a typology of technological virtues that do not constitute mere behavioural correctives, but genuine forms of ethical and spiritual resistance in the digital environment. Technological virtues—from digital prudence to analogical contemplation—articulate the cardinal and theological virtues in the contemporary context, offering tools to evaluate the proximity or distance of technological dynamics from an objective moral order. This work is situated within the horizon of a Christian ethics capable of addressing the challenges of technological contemporaneity, proposing an anthropology that does not reject technology but transfigures it, recognising in technology a space for conversion and realisation of the human vocation to holiness.

When artificial intelligence algorithms produce significant social effects, orienting collective behaviors, transforming urban spaces, perpetuating inequalities, generating new forms of stratification, how should we understand the nature of this causality? This article proposes the concept of participated agency to overcome the inadequacy of existing categories. Anthropomorphism attributes intentionality and subjectivity to AI, treating algorithms as conscious agents. Instrumental reductionism denies any causal efficacy to algorithmic mediations, reducing AI to neutral tools. Both positions share a common assumption: agency must be either fully subjective or completely absent. Participated agency designates a form of causal efficacy that genuinely participates in human action while remaining ontologically subordinate to properly human intelligence—that endowed with intentionality, self-consciousness, and meaning-making capacity. Drawing on Bourdieu's habitus and Latour's Actor-Network Theory, the article articulates this concept through two mechanisms: machine habitus (algorithmic sedimentation of cultural dispositions) and asymmetric co-constitution (mutual definition of human practices and algorithmic systems while maintaining human ontological priority). The empirical case of Waze demonstrates how algorithms coordinate individual behaviors generating unintended collective consequences. The analysis explores sociological implications: crystallization of dispositions, self-fulfilling prophecies, distributed responsibility, requiring governance operating on mediation itself rather than merely regulating use.