Sofie Vlaad

In this written dialogue, four trans philosophers remix and expand on a panel discussion held at the 2025 Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference that explored the pressing issue of trans philosophy’s methods, building on an ongoing discussion in the literature. The panel and this text represent an extended and ongoing discussion between the authors. The authors are committed to neither methodological uniformity nor systematicity. Nevertheless, their embrace of pluralism leads to notable convergences regarding the basic sense that trans philosophy has a political dimension, the notion of philosophical rigor, and the need for reflexivity about trans philosophy’s methods.

With the increasing popularity of large language models, there has been an increase in the number of AI-generated literary works. In the absence of clear authors, and assuming such works have meaning, there lies a puzzle in determining who or what fixes the meaning of such texts. I give an overview of six leading theories for ascribing meaning to literary works. These are Extreme Actual Intentionalism, Modest Actual Intentionalism (1 and 2), Conventionalism, Actual Author Hypothetical Intentionalism, and Postulated Author Hypothetical Intentionalism. I argue that only Conventionalism and Postulated Author Hypothetical Intentionalism show any promise of adjudicating how we ought to ascribe meaning in the case of AI-generated texts, and further that Postulated Author Hypothetical Intentionalism is the stronger of the two views.

This article explores the question as to whether images generated by Artificial Intelligence such as DALL-E 2 can be considered artworks. After providing a brief primer on how technologies such as DALL-E 2 work in principle, I give an overview of three contemporary accounts of art and then show that there is at least one case where an AI-generated image meets the criteria for art membership under all three accounts. I suggest that our collective hesitancy to call AI-generated images art stems from the lack of a clear author figure. I propose two possible complementary solutions. First, that some AI-generated images as artworks are conjunctively authored by both the developers of the AI and the prompt-giver. Second, that AI image generators can themselves be considered works of art authored by the developers. I conclude by way of suggesting that we might have separate art competitions specifically for AI-generated artworks.

Diversity is often announced as a solution to ethical problems in artificial intelligence (AI), but what exactly is meant by diversity and how it can solve those problems is seldom spelled out. This lack of clarity is one hurdle to motivating diversity in AI. Another hurdle is that while the most common perceptions about what diversity is are too weak to do the work set out for them, stronger notions of diversity are often defended on normative grounds that fail to connect to the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. However, there is a long history of research in feminist philosophy of science and a recent body of work in social epistemology that taken together provide the foundation for a notion of diversity that is both strong enough to do the work demanded of it, and can be defended on epistemic grounds that connect with the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. We clarify and defend that notion here by introducing emergent expertise as a network phenomenon wherein groups of workers with expertise of different types can gain knowledge not available to any individual alone, as long as they have ways of communicating across types of expertise. We illustrate the connected epistemic and ethical benefits of designing technology with diverse groups of workers using the examples of an infamous racist soap dispenser, and the millimeter wave scanners used in US airport security.

This paper explores trans poetics as a way of doing trans philosophy. I begin by giving an overview of the current state of trans philosophy. I then give examples of other literatures wherein poetics is taken to be philosophically robust. After giving a brief history of trans poetics, I turn to the poetics statements and poetry of three trans poets—D'Lo, Ching-In Chen, and micha cárdenas—featured in the 2013 anthology Troubling the Line. I show how poetry is often uniquely able to capture the ambiguity of the WTF of trans experience in ways that differ from philosophical argumentation. I conclude by suggesting that poetics might move us away from a potential politics of suffering in trans philosophy to a politics of liberation.