B. Scot Rousse

Philosophy Featured

Philosophers, Punks, & Reluctant Poets

Punk and philosophy both begin in creative refusal: in the refusal to accept inherited answers, in the impulse to question what passes for normal, and in the drive to make meaning where none is guaranteed.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Designing Ourselves: AI, Care, and the Responsibility of Invention

It is up to us to create the practices, skills, and habits for using AI in ways that enhance rather than enfeeble our capacities to care.

Heidegger Featured

Care at the Edge of Automation

Technological research is guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about the nature of cognition, agency, communication, and more. If we are to create technologies that serve human care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.

Heidegger Featured

Strange Familiarity, Part Two (Repost)

An overview of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition and its relevance to Heidegger's ontology.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Talking about Machines that Talk

Human language, intelligence, and mind are fundamentally intertwined with our embodied being-in-the-world.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

AI, Phenomenology, and the Uncanny: A Conversation with Tao Ruspoli

Last month while in Bombay Beach, I joined my friend Tao Ruspoli for a conversation on his excellent podcast, Being in the World. The episode recently appeared on Tao's YouTube channel. Check it out!

Heidegger Featured

Heidegger and Phenomenological Approaches to Work

Today's post is the draft Introduction to a scholarly essay I'm writing for the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Work.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Video of My Talk, "Language, Technology, & Care"

Watch the video of my recent talk, "Language, Technology, & Care." Let me know what you think!

Artificial Intelligence

Language, Technology, & Care

Humanity's challenge is designing how to pursue technological progress within a broader context of care, not mere "values" that are relative to imperatives of efficiency and optimization.

Artificial Intelligence

Frictionless Spinning in the Void: AI is Not 'There'

More than ever, we need to bring into focus and nurture those aspects of being human that escape notice when we focus on our calculating, rationalizing, and cognizing abilities.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Care, Machines, & Nihilism

Human language is inseparable from our embodied engagement in the world, amidst other people, in pursuit of what matters.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Can Machines Be in Language?

Our way of having language is deeply intertwined with our propensity to care. Machines do not and cannot care.

Heidegger Featured

Ontology, What is it Good For? (Being and Time, §3)

Heidegger's ambition to make his brand of "fundamental ontology" reign over all other fields of scientific inquiry partakes in the pretensions of old-fashioned, traditional metaphysics.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Navigating the AI Conversation, Part Two

How can beginners and non-specialists make sense of the dizzying developments in AI? The first step is to look beyond the headlines and view AI as a structured field of ongoing conversations. Let this post be your guide.

Artificial Intelligence Featured

Navigating the AI Conversation, Part One

We denizens of the 21st century have been thrown into the age of planetary AI. What kind of human beings are we going to become? How can we learn to make sense of our historical moment?

Heidegger Featured

“Who’s Asking?” - Spelling out the Question of Being (Being and Time, §2)

Our tendency to inquire into being is continuous with our tendency to wonder whether life has any meaning.

Heidegger Featured

Strange Familiarity, Part Two

An overview of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition and its relevance to Heidegger's ontology.

Heidegger Featured

Strange Familiarity, Part One

Traditional philosophers related to the world like it was a strangely unfamiliar kitchen.

Heidegger Featured

What is Being? Indeed.

Today we continue our inquiry into being. We dig into Being and Time, section 2: “The Formal Structure of the Question of Being.” We encounter Heidegger’s provisional and perplexing definition of “being” itself.

Heidegger

Getting in Touch with Being (Being and Time §1)

This week we focus on the first section of Being and Time, “The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being.” This section begins to reveal that we have a sense for being that is deeper than knowledge.

Heidegger Featured

What is Ontology and Why Does it Matter? Beginning with Heidegger’s Being and Time.

This week, we have the first installment of our exploration of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Today, we are beginning only with the first page of the book. The motto is: Welcome to Ontological Perplexity

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