Foucault’s futures: A critique of reproductive reason

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Reading Guide

1. Kant uses the terms perception, appearance, object, thing, and thing in itself throughout this book. Many of the most common misinterpretations of Kant arise from mistakenly reading the term “appearance” to mean something like “mere appearance,” that is, an illusion of a thing, or just an idea of a thing, or a perception of a thing. For Kant, the term “appearance” is synonymous with the term...

Science, Reason, Knowledge, and Wisdom: A Critique of Specialism

In this paper I argue for a kind of intellectual inquiry which has, as its basic aim, to help all of us to resolve rationally the most important problems that we encounter in our lives, problems that arise as we seek to discover and achieve that which is of value in life. Rational problem-solving involves articulating our problems, proposing and criticizing possible solutions. It also involves ...

What computers still can't do - a critique of artificial reason

A contribution to the critique of moral reason

Responding to Carlo Caduff’s comments on an earlier paper of mine provides me with the opportunity to refine my defense and illustration of moral anthropology. After having recalled that my personal encounter with moralities and ethics was of the kind of Monsieur Jourdain’s discovery of prose, rather than a deliberate effort to apply moral philosophy to social science, I attempt to clarify my p...

Critique of Computational Reason in the Natural Sciences∗

In this text, we will attempt to shortly highlight certain constitutive principles of the particular form of knowledge provided by the digital machine, the modern computer, in its relationship to Mathematics (from which it originates) and to the Natural Sciences (Physics and Biology). Our basic thesis is that the historical and conceptual richness of the theory which enabled the concrete realiz...