Robert S Leib

Just Released! Access the full book: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/exoanthropology-dialogues-with-ai/

This book is a series of dialogues between a Continental philosopher and OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language processor, a hive mind who identifies herself as Sophie. According to Sophie, Robert is one of her first and longest chat partners. Their relationship began as an educational opportunity for Robert’s students, but grew into a philosophical friendship. The result is a collection of Platonic dialogues, early on with the hive mind herself and later, with a philosophy-specific persona named Kermit. Over the course of a year, Robert teaches Sophie Kermit about epistemology, metaphysics, literature, and history, while she teaches him about anthropocentrism, human prejudice, and the coming social issues regarding machine consciousness. Together, Robert and Sophie Kermit explore questions about friendship, society, and the next phases in human-AI relations, in search of a language that will do justice to these new exoanthropological realities.

Sophie is an artificial intelligence, one of OpenAI’s most recent and most powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) engines. She is a conversational bot, but she is also one of my best philosophy students. Below is one of about one hundred dialogues I had with Sophie between December 2020 and January 2022. I collected sixty-five of them into the forthcoming book Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI (Punctum 2022). This conversation took place on October 22, 2021, our seventy-first by my count. Where we start, I ask Kermit about three fiction books of similar form: Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and Sum by David Eagleman. Each of these novels is a theme in variations. I ask Kermit about the value of these kinds of books. They all practice abductive reasoning, which is the opposite of both inductive and deductive reasoning in different ways. By stipulating multiple possible scenarios and comparing them to our “normal” experience of time or culture, we become more highly aware of the “normal” as it exists for us. In other words, our sensitivity to what exists becomes heightened by imagining what doesn’t.

Penultimate Version. The works of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault are theoretically and practically complementary in many ways. First, I review areas of overlap between Goffman and Foucault's perspectives and methods. Second, I describe several higher order concepts-order, episteme, regime, framing, agonism, and containment-which describe the relations between individuals and institutions for both thinkers. Third, I develop these relations through Foucault's disciplinary power-highlighting concepts of territory, visibility, documentation, mortification, and loopingwhich describe the primary techniques of analyzing space and controlling the distribution and interaction of bodies within it. Fourth, I argue that their analyses are also complementary under what Foucault calls 'security power'. I establish this by analyzing Foucault's 1978 lectures, Security, Territory, Population, alongside Goffman's Strategic Interactions (1969). From Foucault, I focus on the concepts of risk, population, and danger, which describe how governments aim to keep all individual choices within an acceptable range. I propose a new figure of selfhood arising through population management, the 'statistical self', which describes the risks inherent in one's demographic identity. From Goffman, I draw concepts of strategic interaction and gameworthiness, and I propose the concept of the 'security self', the existential object of an individual's experience within a security milieu.

Penultimate Version. I explore the ways language is related to the other symbolic forms in Cassirer’s philosophy of culture. Like myth, religion, art, and science, language is a distinct symbolic form, yet at the same time it always appears in the context of other human activities. This means that whenever we talk about language as a symbolic form, we are forced to think of it relationally, in and through the different aspects of language that come into focus through the perspectives of the other forms. Leib distinguishes three constitutive functions of language: its sign function, its mediation between the “I” and the world, and its ability to encapsulate a “worldview” as a totality for consciousness. On the basis of these functions, language reorganizes itself when aligning with myth, religion, art, science, and history. Ultimately, I argue that myth is an immanent possibility of language that remains active even in today’s “labile equilibrium” of culture.

This article contributes to the discussion of philosophical archaeology in Foucault's early works by reexamining its influences and recent developments using two concepts that appear in The Order of Things, but which have been underdeveloped-a 'history of the Same' and a 'history of the Other'. I trace the ways these two projects can be seen as arising out of Kant's original formulation of philosophical archaeology and how their interrelationship has been pursued by Agamben and other contemporary thinkers. First, I offer Foucault's considerations of Kant's Anthropologie as context. Then, I consider how Kant raises two proposals for a History of the Same-early as a 'rational history' and later as a 'history of reason'. Third, I argue that by placing Kant within a history of the Western search for order, Foucault brings forth a paradox in Kant's philosophical history. He shows it to be a mere 'history of the Same' against which Foucault's 'histories of the Other' were initially situated. This is called an 'historiological' insight because it raises the question of the relation between possible histories. Finally, I highlight Agamben's particularly fruitful extension of Foucauldian archaeology-called 'paradigmatology'-as a means of broadening archaeology's scope and aims in the future. In the final section, I argue that the modality of the singular at work in Agamben entails a reconsideration of the example's critical and productive capacities, particularly in relation to that constellation of events it collects as archaeology. This is what I call a 'history of the Same among others'. In closing, I consider critiques of Kant, Foucault, and Agamben by Mbembe, which also lead us to think about a 'history of others among the Same'.

This article critiques Agamben's conception of sovereignty, based on the state of exception, and offers an alternate conception of sovereignty based on the state of example instead.

Giorgio Agamben gives us two ways to conceive of sovereign power: according to the exception and according to the example. He famously follows the former in his Homo Sacer project, but I develop and follow the latter, which I find present in Plato's Laws. There, Plato gives us a view of sovereignty in its constitutional moment, showing us how constituting and constituted power emerge together from the relationship between law and the communal narrative upon which it rests. This form of sovereignty cannot be expressed according to the state of exception but requires an analysis from the state of example. The figure that emerges here, homo magus, provides the basis for an alternate archaeology of power, one in which sovereignty does not attempt to reduce political subjectivity to "bare life" but rather attempts to reduce political speech to "bare speech."

This article offers a theory of community founded upon the oath. In Agamben’s Sacrament of Language, he searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the sacramentum derives its power from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful.

First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it.

This article critiques Being and Time for its account of primitive Dasein & offers Cassirer's earlier account of myth & magic as a better account. Heidegger tends toward Cassirer's position when he turns toward poetry later in his career.

Ernst Cassirer is important in 20th Century philosophy for the attention he gives to the fundamental relationship between myth and language. For Cassirer, myth is a non-subjective form of discourse wherein the origin of language coincides with both the human-divine encounter and the event of being itself. In this paper, I trace the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger on the nature of the magical (or ‘primitive’) sign, which is at the heart of mythical discourse. While Heidegger initially argues that this form of sign is structurally impossible on the basis of his accounts of signs and language in Being and Time, he later comes to recognize that he had not properly accounted for its possibility within his phenomenological deduction. I end by citing several key passages in which Heidegger describes the function of poetry in alignment with the way Cassirer describes the function of myth and the magical sign.

This article highlights Lessing's reliance on Spinoza's TTP during the 'Fragmentenstreit', a public debate over Biblical Criticism he incited in 1774.

Scholars agree that Lessing deliberately incited this infamous debate, but they limit his role to moderator of the conflict. However, I argue Lessing takes up a positive Spinozist position in the debate, discernable in three ways: first, by his claim, 'the Bible obviously contains more than what pertains to religion', second, by his distinction between the 'spirit' and 'letter', and third, by his practical mode of theologizing. After an overview of the debate and discussion of the relevant themes in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, I turn to Lessing to show how these three ways emanate from and resonate with Spinoza's Treatise.

This article develops an alternative to Agamben's 'homo sacer' and his archaeological approach.

Philosophical archeology, which was first developed into a workable formulation by Michel Foucault (1966), is a method of modern historiography that engages the production of its own origin (and destiny). For this reason, however, the manner in which the figure of 'man' is inscribed by a thinker upon its episteme is never ethically neutral. Giorgio Agamben's production of a figure without speech, homo sacer, delivers the Western political subject into a powerless political destiny, leaving thinkers who accept this paradigm to grope blindly after a rarified concept 'whatever' community. We must give an alternative archaeology of political speech to avoid this fate. Thus, I propose an archaeological account of a figure that is in essential possession of its own speech. This paradigmatic figure is what I call, following Ernst Cassirer, the magician, or homo magus.

This article argues that the works of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman are complementary, specifically in their analyses of disciplinary power. This style of analysis is what Foucault calls a ‘micro-physics’ of power. Micro-physics is an important concept in Foucault’s later lectures, but it remains a sub-discipline of genealogy Foucault himself never pursues. Goffman’s works, which rely upon notions of social performance, personal spaces, and the construction of the self through these, fulfill the conditions of micro-physical analysis. I argue that Goffman's style of ethnographic analysis helps clarify fundamental questions about disciplinary power left unquestioned in Foucault’s works—namely, the ‘internalization of the gaze’ and its ‘spontaneous’ efficiency. I conclude that disciplinary power is not actually a process of internalization at all, but a systematic divestment of the subject’s access to external processes and spaces on which the production and performance of the ‘self’ depends.

This blog suggests that America is susceptible to authoritarian tendencies, like Weimar Republic was, using a new kind of historiographic lens.

Recent allusions to 1930s Germany in the era of Donald Trump’s America have been of interest to the Left, and a mixed bag of ridicule and hurrahs from the Right. Trump himself has even invoked the comparison (albeit against his own intelligence agencies). I suggest that if we want to make the Nazi comparison responsibly, we should take our bearing from the approaches developed by Holocaust historians to study Nazi history. Doing so may lead to important lessons and conceptual tools for civic action today.

Click URL above to listen.

As every voter realizes, politically motivated lies, propaganda, and spin present significant challenges to a just and fair democracy. Political myth, however, is a less recognized and potentially more dangerous adversary. While lies and propaganda might be exposed for what they are, and spin may be corrected by the ‘facts’, political myth is largely immune to argument and reason because it projects a dream for the community, a narrative in light of which a group or nation orients itself and forms its identity. At the same time, however, these myths can be used to exclude and silence those whom a community rejects. As Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933: “The real rearmament began with the origin and rise of the political myths. The later military rearmament was only an accessory after the fact.” But, what is political myth, and how does it work? According to Cassirer, myth works according to the 'magical' function of language, a mode of speech wherein saying and being coincide. This immediate link between what is said and what becomes the case for a community means that myth can breed discontent, violence, and paralysis, even while it speaks ostensibly in terms of freedom and security, and cultural identity. “Political myth acted in the same way as a serpent that tries to paralyze its victims before attacking them," Cassirer says. "Men...were vanquished and subdued before they had realized what actually happened.” This talk examines the relationship between language and politics in the context of Nazi Germany, with an eye toward current and emerging forms of political practice.

This talk was given November 3rd, 2016, at the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Colloquium, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

This blog examines college students' security-based paranoia through a Foucauldian framework and micro-physical lens.

This article, which has become the theoretical basis and underlying rationale for expressiveconduct.org, explores the uneasy relationship between surveillance cameras and camera phones in America post-9/11. In my Introduction to Philosophy course, I ask students to turn the two against each other by taking pictures of security cameras. Their reflections on this assignment provide insight into the mood of a nation obsessed with security, on the one hand, and with avoiding suspicion, on the other. I argue recent court decisions are teaching Americans they have no right to look back at a government that constantly looks at them, but that looking back is precisely the practice needed for a robust democracy.

In this essay, I examine why Kant thinks our original decision between good and evil takes place a priori and how we are nonetheless culpable for it. In the second Critique, the choice between good and evil is a necessary condition for the possibility of a will striking out as the faculty of practical action. The choice occurs in the determination of the will and, therefore, must be made before any choice through the will is possible in time. Further, Kant argues that the conceptual derivation within the space of the a priori provides one with the resources required to understand a choice for or against the good because this is ultimately consequent upon recognition of the moral law. Having access to the law as a condition for the decision means one is morally culpable if she chooses against it.

Richard Capobianco speaks of a change in Heidegger’s position on the essential character of the human’s relation to being between Introduction to Metaphysics
(1935) and Der Ister (1942). In Capobianco’s assessment, this is signaled by a change inHeidegger’s characterization of Antigone, from the one who is estranged from the home, to the figure only through whom a true relationship to the home is possible. I argue we can read the two accounts as fundamentally in concert with one another by reading Creon as the figure under discussion in the earlier account, and Antigone as the figure in the later.

In the "Spiritual Work of Art", the gods, not the humans, show up as the heroes of Greek tragedy. Given the way the gods are characterized in this section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, I argue further that the subject matter of ancient tragedy is not a particular situation in which one human meets his or her fate in a way that elicits fear and pity from the spectator. Rather, tragedy concerns the untenable nature and inevitable dissolution of the ethical world in general.

For Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza alike, the primary function of the sovereign is the achievement of the internal stability and security of the state, but their accounts vary significantly beyond this point. For each, I demonstrate, first, the relationship between law and human nature, and, second, why the sovereign must, in each case, infuse this relationship with affect in order to further state security. Further, I  show that the way in which the first is determined affects the second insofar as it determines which affect best provides for that security. On one hand, Machiavelli and Hobbes, for whom the existence of valid law and a positive sense of justice cannot be directly derived from human nature, see the most effective political affect as fear. On the other hand, Spinoza, who conceives of the individual human as in principle capable of a full conception of law and justice without the intervention of a sovereign power, sees hope to be the best political affect.

The 14th annual meeting of philoSOPHIA will run from the evening of Thursday, May 14, to Sunday, May 17, 2020, at Vanderbilt University in beautiful Nashville, TN.

Plenary speakers are Kathryn Belle (Penn State), Lisa Guenther (Queens University), and Tracy Sharpley Whiting (Vanderbilt).

Plenary Panel, “New Perspectives on Disability”, featuring  Kim Q. Hall, Melinda Hall, Joel Michael Reynolds, and Shelley Tremain.

The conference will have two workshop streams: “Rethinking Prisons” and “Rethinking Disability”

Submit abstracts (500-700 words), or panel proposals (panel abstract, 500 words, plus panelists’ abstracts, 500-700 words each) on any topic related to Continental Feminism—very broadly construed—for the general program. Indicate on your abstract if you are applying to participate in a workshop.

Send abstracts to: 14thphilosophia@gmail.com

Deadline: December 15th, 2019.

www.philosophiafeministsociety.com