Joseph Tanke
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Joseph Tanke is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. He is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, with a particular interest in aesthetics and social and political philosophy.
Joseph Tanke joins the Paris IAS in september 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research project
AI; Artificial Intelligence; the social history of technology.
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
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