Leonhard Schütz-Bauer

Whether AI makes us smarter depends entirely on what we mean by smart. The question is caught in a reflexive loop: how we measure intelligence shapes what intelligence becomes, which in turn shapes how we measure it. Educational frameworks like »constructive alignment« (CA) embody this tension by ensuring students learn what can be measured. The problem becomes acute with GenAI: the one thing that cannot be measured in education is also something GenAI cannot do – what Plessner called »[Sehen] mit anderen Augen«, the capacity to step outside one’s evaluative framework and re-evaluate it. GenAI can, at best, make us »smarter« only within fixed frameworks, but not in the capacity that grounds all intelligence: transcending and evaluating frameworks themselves. When empirical studies measure whether AI makes us smarter using constructive alignment metrics, they engage in what I call »destructive alignment« (DA), i.e. constructive from the standpoint of current measurement, but destructive from the standpoint of genuine intelligence.

What has anarchy got to do with intercultural philosophy? In this essay I show how anarchist positions and theorems as they are developed within Paul Karl Feyerabend's (P. K. F.) philosophy can for one be understood as the fundamentals of every pluralistic or anti-transcendental philosophy and for another that they can be used as a motivational source for legitimizing the basis of intercultural philosophy. The latter consists inter alia of the critical analysis of one's own tradition's criteria for evaluating others resp. the critical analysis of the practice of insinuating values on groups who »think differently« as well as the systematically underrepresented use of common-sense thought. I demonstrate that P. K. F., an almost forgotten Austrian philosopher, manages to anti-systematically introduce a variety of different philosophical criticisms. These focus primarily on the often-unquestioned disconnection between scientific method and humanistic values. I show how P. K. F. establishes an anarchistic way of arguing for one's beliefs, without having to commit to certain logical consequences of one's propositions. Lastly, I elaborate three entwined solutions by P. K. F. concerning philosophical problems such as the anticipation of the possible, learning and unity resp. the problem of universal conditions for understanding others.

This paper explores a counterfactual scenario (CW) in which large language models (LLMs) produce philosophical texts that are epistemically indistinguishable from those authored by humans. Building from this scenario, I develop three interconnected arguments about the institutional, rhetorical, and conceptual implications of such a world: (1) a paradox of obsolescence, in which the same indistinguishability that motivates the use of LLMs undermines the evaluative structures that make their use meaningful; (2) a paradox of rhetorical saturation, in which the formal capacity to justify any claim by accepted standards reveals the limits of justification as a normative concept; and (3) a paradox of dialogical return, in which the loss of meaningfully authored philosophical texts drives a renewed emphasis on dialogical understanding over argumentative finality. The conclusion suggests that CW is less a speculative fiction than a diagnostic mirror, reflecting unacknowledged tensions in the current philosophical paradigm.