The past, present, and future encounters between computation and the humanities

Abstract

The philosophy of Artificial Intelligence has traditionally focused its efforts on the critical assessment of concepts and theories emerging from the concrete work done in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Classic examples are the sustained critique that Herbert Dreyfus has been pursuing since the early 1970s [14, 15, 16] and John Searle’s critique of “strong AI” [47]. Margaret Boden’s collection [4] epitomizes this approach, whose underlying assumption accepts Artificial Intelligence as a non-philosophical scientific discipline that may be susceptible to the standard epistemological analysis that philosophers carry out on physics, biology, and other scientific disciplines.