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Humanities

Of what can I be truly certain?
Of what can I be truly certain?

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel

Mister Descartes and his Evil Genius

Can one trust his senses when perceiving the outside world? When my sensations are the basis of my perception of my own existence, what if these sensations are to be doubted – what can the proof of my own existence be? These questions, both simple and profoundly undermining, stand at the beginning of Modernity: the philosophy of René Descartes. This book drags its readers – and musketeer-like Mister Descartes himself – into the adventure of thinking. It gives a lively...
  • Descartes
  • thinking
  • certainty
  • young readers
  • epistemology
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

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Topics
  • minima oeconomica

    minima oeconomica

    Analysen und Kritik moderner Ökonomie, deren Wissenschaft und Legitmation im Zeitalter der Finanzialisierung

    • economics
    • economization
    • economy
    • financial crisis
    • financial markets
    • discourse history
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • idleness
    • potentiality
    • experiment
    • poetics
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • epistemology
    • literary studies
    • astonishment
    • poetology of knowledge
    • history of knowledge
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • fiction
    • autobiography
    • autofiction
    • memory
    • Theory of fiction
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • observer
    • gaze
    • mirror
    • optical illusion

 

Between Segregation, Cooperation, and Craziness
Between Segregation, Cooperation, and Craziness

Sebastian Vehlken

Ghetto Blasts

Even if it became popular in the context of the algorithmitization of the behavior of social insects, the birthplace of the term Swarm Intelligence is in robotics. Even engineers are subject to discourse dynamics: When Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang gave a short presentation on Cellular Robots at a NATO robotics workshop in 1988, that is, on “groups of robots that could work like cells of an organism to assemble more complex parts,” commentators allegedly demanded a buzzword “to describe...
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  • robot
  • interdisciplinarity
  • Computer graphics
  • swarm intelligence
  • interface