Three Ways of Thinking AI Philosophically

This project identifies three of the main ways in which AI has been conceptualized within the discipline of philosophy, and endeavors to develop a new model for grasping its social significance. Against the dominance of Anglo-analytic approaches, it foregrounds resources from the Continental tradition (Marx, Negri, Foucault, Simondon).

First, the classical cognitivist position—from Turing to Searle—frames AI as a problem of intelligence; however, today, intelligence needs to be reinterpreted in terms of Turing’s “other test,” wherein machine learning forces humanity to confront itself from the standpoint of a system that exceeds its capacity for reason. Second, the Marxist approach understands AI as an automatization and privatization of society’s “general intellect,” processes which raise pressing questions about data extraction, ownership, and exploitation. Finally, the Foucaultian perspective treats AI as a regime of normative reason that shapes subjectivity by legitimating and delegitimating certain discourses, thereby extending power’s reach through algorithmic governance.

Taken together, these orientations form a critical framework for understanding AI not as a neutral tool, but as a historically situated transformation of language, labor, and life.

Key publications

Joseph Tanke, « Connection Without Presence: AI and the "Death of Man" », forthcoming in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Joseph Tanke, « The Gentle Way in Governing: Foucault and the Question of Neoliberalism », Philosophy and Social Criticism, 49, no. 3 (2023).
DOI: 10.1177/01914537221079673

Joseph Tanke, « Aesthetics and Philosophy from Baumgarten to Nietzsche », Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines, eds., Zoltán Somhegyi and Max Ryynänen (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14772590