Veronica Cibotaru

The development of artificial intelligence necessarily implies the anthropological question of the difference between human and artificial intelligence for two reasons: on the one hand artificial intelligence tends to be conceived on the model of human intelligence, on the other hand, a large part of types of artificial intelligence are designed in order to exhibit at least some features of what is conceived as being human intelligence. In this article I address this anthropological question in two parts. First I bring into review and classify some of the main answers that have been proposed until now to this question. I argue that these variety of answers can be broadly classified in three categories, namely a (1) behaviorist, (2) a representational, and (3) a holistic understanding of human intelligence. In a second moment I propose an alternative way of understanding the difference between human and artificial intelligence, which is not essentialist but contextualist and content-related. Contrary to possible answers that I analyse in the first section, this alternative model does not aim at grasping the essence of human intelligence, which could or could not be reproduced in principle by artificial intelligence. It situates rather the fundamental differences between human and artificial intelligence in the context of human existence and the conceptual content of human intelligence, following the phenomenological description of one of its most fundamental features, namely its life-world. Grounding on this approach, it is possible to argue that human and artificial intelligence could be distinct, even if one could prove that they are eidetically, i.e. by their essence, identical.

The starting point of this article lies in the idea, defended by Hannah Arendt, according to which only goodness can be radical, while evil is merely banal. The idea of a banality of evil is present in Arendt’s work Eichmann in Jerusalem, although it is explicitly not presented as a general theory on evil as such – it is more particularly in her correspondence with Gershom Scholem that one can find this specific distinction between evil and goodness mentioned. How is this distinction to be understood? This article proposes the idea that such a distinction has to be construed on an ontological level: evil is ontologically deficient, since it does not take hold in a specific capacity of human beings, which would be what Hannah Arendt calls the demonic evil, but in the absence of thinking, i.e. in the absence of a specific human faculty. Conversely, only goodness expresses a creative human faculty, which is precisely thinking, and which, following Hannah Arendt, can be fully realized only through a political, collective dimension.

This edited volume offers a comprehensive view of various possible phenomenological approaches of the experience of love, ranging from classical historical perspectives up to contemporary and critical viewpoints. It explores both the crucial importance of the question of love for the history of phenomenology as well as the rich potential of phenomenology for a deeper insight in the experience of love and its various dimensions, such as its affective, relational, but also ethical and religious aspects.

The aim of this chapter is to study the meaning of the concept of ‘transcendental’ in the philosophies of Kant and Husserl by focusing on the motives that led these two thinkers to introduce this notion into their systems. We will show that they are guided by two different motives. While Kant introduces the concept of transcendental because he aims to save the possibility of metaphysics, Husserl reengages it in his quest for a deeper understanding of the relationship between the subject and the world. Nevertheless, I aim to show that these two different uses of ‘transcendental’ share one common feature: they both account for the imperative of the infinite as a fundamental structure of subjectivity.