Jeffrey White

Karl Jaspers describes limit situations as experiences that fundamen­tally challenge our existing worldview and self-image, bringing us to the brink of existence. In this sense, trauma can also be subsumed under this term: as an event that shatters all previous assumptions about the world and cannot be appropriated and integrated into the context of existing life. The intrusion of something foreign into one’s own body, the experience of powerlessness and helplessness, can irreversibly shake one’s fundamental trust in the world. Those affected remain scarred by the physical limit experience to which they were exposed. How this limit situation can nevertheless be reintegrated into life in the long term is the central question for trauma therapy.

Starting from classical philosophical suggestions about the status of happiness recipes that suggest the optimal ways to reach it, I will soon illustrate the fundamental Kantian suggestion: “No one can coerce me to be happy in his way”, that is, an individual has the right to choose their own kind of happiness “provided he does not infringe upon that freedom of others to strive for a like end which can coexist with the freedom of everyone”. I will conclude that happiness (and even its very possibility) is constrained in a relational interplay in a collective of human beings. Thanks to the events that took place during the notorious “enclosures”, which violently expropriated peasants by destroying their homes and cottages during the so-called primitive accumulation of capitalism, I will provide a very clear example of the relational nature of happiness and even its potential to be jeopardized. The idea of a “moral bubble” will be proposed as an explanation for why some people fail to recognize the harm they create when they jeopardize the happiness of other humans. A study of the current predatory neoliberal capitalism’s peculiar propensity to make the majority of people unhappy will be the focus of the last section. The article interdisciplinarily aims at bridging philosophy, economics, sociology, and political theory, enriching the philosophical analysis with historical and contemporary contexts, and also providing the following critical engagement: the analysis of how dominant narratives and economic frameworks serve to mask violence, thus challenging readers at least to reconsider accepted truths about progress and prosperity.

Work is a major concern for most individuals, including scholars, and yet it is rarely mentioned, let alone studied, in research on mind and cognition. This article aims to demonstrate the relevance of work for cognitive research, by showing specifically how an enactive approach can illuminate the analysis of work. To help in this task, the article introduces “contemporary living labour theory” (CLLT), a rich strand of contemporary research based on Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamics of work. After outlining the two main paradigms, the article explores what an enactive approach informed by CLLT can teach about work across the different aspects of embodiment: metabolic, affective, sensorimotor and intersubjective. For each one of those aspects, an enactive approach lends descriptive richness and specificity to the analysis of work. However, CLLT also complements and extends the enactive approach at several important points. To “bring forth a world” is not just an epistemic or symbolic act, but also the outcome of work.

This chapter will define the term overcomputationalism and explain how it relates to the concepts of pancognitivism, paninformationalism, and pancomputationalism and how they can affect the preservation of our free will (and to avoid the death of homo faber), as expressed by the Latin motto quisque faber suae fortunae, which was rediscovered by humanists in the 14th century and played a major role in the Italian Renaissance. I would like to bring the reader’s attention to a query that, in my opinion, captures many of the issues surrounding the aforementioned topic: would future eco-cognitive settings be computationally or humanly tailored? We will see how computational invasive “subcultures”, such as robots, bots etc., constitute challenges to human creativity, ownership of our own destinies, and epistemic rigor. To maximize the power of man to influence his own destiny, everyday, philosophical, and scientific knowledge about natural and artificial phenomena have to be protected. I will then go on to discuss two important roles performed by human knowledge and the necessity for their ongoing improvement. Human beings have increased their ability to track the outside world, and as a result, thanks to ethical knowledge, humans have learned to track the behavior of other humans with the intention of promoting collaboration and, as a result, free and conscious initiatives and proposals.

The essay is facing a legitimacy crisis. With students increasingly able to generate plausible submissions using Generative AI, the essay’s status as a valid instrument of assessment of student learning is under serious threat. Yet, rather than abandoning the essay or turning to superficial fixes, this paper argues that the current disruption offers a chance to reconsider what essays are for as well as the chance to consider what they could be. In this paper, we distinguish between the standardised academic essay of today from the historically contextualised essay. Drawing from the history of ideas, we argue that essays are best understood not as products to be measured against static criteria, but exploratory engagements with thought, shaped by uncertainty, divergence, and the recursive relationship between writer and text. This understanding has long been at odds with how essays are typically assessed and it is this misalignment, not AI alone, that we suggest underpins the current crisis. In response, we propose a set of structural changes to essay assessment design. We propose a holistic approach to assessment which, we suggest, helps show how the essay can be reconfigured as both an educationally meaningful and valid assessment task, fit for an age of AI without being defined by it.

Over the last several years, predictive processing approaches to computational neuropsychiatry have been gaining explanatory traction. According to these accounts, some of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia arise from aberrant precision-weighting during hierarchical Bayesian inference. In contrast to computational approaches, the phenomenological tradition in psychiatry holds that disruptions or alterations of the self (Ichstörungen) lie at the core of schizophrenia. In this article, we aim to integrate these approaches. We align ourselves with the phenomenological insight that self-disturbances lie at the core of schizophrenia and with the hierarchical conception of the self-model that emerges from the predictive processing architecture. We suggest that disruptions of the “hard core” of the narrative self-model might be partially involved in the generation of aberrant experiences and hyperreflexivity, and in some aspects of the sense of self-alienation and ambiguity that is characteristic of the phenomenology of schizophrenia.

Concept normativity is a prominent subject of inquiry in the philosophical literature on the nature of concepts. Concepts are said to be normative, in that the use of concepts to categorise is associated with an evaluation of the appropriateness of such categorisation measured against some objective external standard. Two broad groups of views have emerged in accounting for the normativity of concepts: a weaker view traces such normativity to the social practice in which the agent using the concept is embedded, while a stronger view traces such normativity to a first-person capacity of reflection. However, both views have drawbacks: the weaker view seems not to do justice to the basic sense of normativity associated with an individual agent using a concept, while the stronger view ties such normativity with the first-person conscious evaluation, which appears to be too strong. Here, we propose a different view of concepts using principles from the Active Inference framework. We reconceive concepts, defining them as Bayesian beliefs—that is, conditional probability distributions—that represent causes and contingencies in the world, their form grounded in the exchange between the agent and its environment. This allows us to present a different view on the source of normativity, with an emphasis on the structure of the agent itself as well as its interaction with the environment. On the Active Inference view, concepts are normative in that they are intrinsically connected to the self-evidencing nature of an agent, whose very structure implies an evaluation of the concepts it employs.

The notion of trustworthy AI has been proposed in response to mounting public criticism of AI systems, in particular with regard to the proliferation of such systems into ever more sensitive areas of human life without proper checks and balances. In Europe, the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence has recently presented its Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. To some, the guidelines are an important step for the governance of AI. To others, the guidelines distract effort from genuine AI regulation. In this chapter, we engage in a critical discussion of the concept of trustworthy AI by probing the concept both on theoretical and practical grounds, assessing its substance and the feasibility of its intent. We offer a concise overview of the guidelines and their vision for trustworthy AI and examine the conceptual underpinnings of trustworthy AI by considering how notions of 'trust' and 'trustworthiness' have been discussed in the philosophical literature. We then discuss several epistemic obstacles and moral requirements when striving to achieve trustworthy AI in practice before concluding with an argument in support of the establishment of a trustworthy AI culture that respects and protects foundational values.

During the second half of the last century, the importance of serendipitous events in scientific frameworks has been progressively recognized, fueling hard debates about their role, nature, and structure in philosophy and sociology of science. Alas, while discussing the relevance of the topic for the comprehension of the nature of scientific discovery, the philosophical literature has hardly paid attention to the cognitive significance of serendipity, accepting rather than examining some of its most specific features, such as its game-changing effect, the unexpectedness of its occurrence, and its affinity with the concept of “luck”. Thus, in this paper we aim at analyzing these characteristics in the light of their cognitive implications in the recognition, performance, and possible stimulation of serendipitous events in relation to scientific discoveries.