We are living through an era of increased robotization, with robots becoming integrated into settings such as factories, hospitals, transportation systems, military, workplaces, households and healthcare. But what are the social and moral implications arising from our interpersonal connections with robots? Can robots have significant moral status? Can we be friends with a robot? When your robot lover tells you that it loves you, should you believe it? In this conversation, philosopher of technology John Danaher considers whether we are robots ourselves; whether we should understand our relationships with robots by analogy with non-human animals; whether robot friendships can complement and possibly enhance human friendships; whether robots have an inner life; whether robots are capable of deceiving us; and much more.

JOHN DANAHER is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway. He researches on a wide range of topics at the interface of philosophy, law and technology, and he is host of the popular “Philosophical Disquisitions” podcast.

ANTHONY MORGAN is editor of The Philosopher and commissioning editor for philosophy at Agenda Publishing.

Anthony Morgan (AM): In an interview, the philosopher Kevin O’Regan said that he believes he is a robot, and, furthermore, that people get upset when he tells them that they are robots because they feel that they’re persons and not robots. He goes on to say that the fact that he is a robot doesn't mean that he doesn't suffer pain or fall in love or appreciate art. It just means that there are no “magical mechanisms” explaining these phenomena, such as free will. What insights do you think we can glean from thinking about whether we are robots ourselves?

John Danaher (JD): I consider our world to be a collection of mechanistic structures knitted together in very complicated ways, and so we are in principle very sophisticated mechanisms. Hence if we can create mechanisms that are as sophisticated as us – they may not be exactly functionally equivalent but they may behave and act in much the same way – then they can have all the qualities and attributes that we have, and possibly others too. Thus there's no reason for me to think that we can't create general artificial intelligence or robots that are effectively the same as humans.

According to traditional theories of responsibility, we would not think that western consumers have any responsibility for the exploitation of sweatshop workers, as we are not connected to them in a way that moral philosophy has typically been able to understand. Iris Marion Young, however, wanted to make sense of the kind of responsibility that western activists felt when protesting global injustices. This led to her model of structural injustice and our responsibility for structural injustice. This conversation between two scholars of Young's work offers a clear overview of Young's diverse and influential philosophical output. McKeown and Nuti explore questions such as: are corporations to blame for their unjust practices? How do individuals assume responsibility for structural injustice without feeling completely powerless in the face of so many injustices? What is the relationship between activism and political theory?

MAEVE MCKEOWN is Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the interdisciplinary faculty Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen. Her current research focuses on individuals’ responsibilities for global injustice.

ALASIA NUTI is a lecturer in the department of politics at the University of York. She works in contemporary political theory and gender studies, and has a strong interest in postcolonial theory and critical race theory.

ALASIA NUTI (AN): Who was Iris Marion Young and why has she become this very important political philosopher. Also, when and how did you come across her work, and what do you find so appealing in her writings?

Maeve McKeown (MM): Iris Marion Young is the greatest! Anyone who is interested in philosophy, political theory, or feminism, needs to read her work. She was born in 1949 and died in 2006 at the age of 56, which was a big loss for the political theory community. She contributed to pretty much every area of contemporary political theory: in her early work she dealt with justice theory, democratic theory, feminist phenomenology, and Marxist feminism, and in her later work, structural injustice and global political issues. She seemed to enter a research area in political theory, say some amazing things, and then move onto another area! While she was certainly a big name in academia, especially after her 1990 book Justice and the Politics of Difference, it is only in the last 15 years that her work has taken on a life of its own to the extent that she has almost become part of the canon.

With the rise of social epistemology over the past decade, epistemologists have for the most part moved beyond the purely analytical task of defining knowledge, with their work today touching on almost every aspect of our lives. This conversation between social epistemologists Lani Watson and Aidan McGlynn coincided with the publication of the “Authority and Knowledge” issue of The Philosopher. In that issue, we asked how what counts as knowledge both depends on and supports authority, as well as what forms knowledge has to take (objective, expert, etc.) in order to be authoritative. Lani Watson's idea of “epistemic rights” expands the question of rights to include the right to goods such as information, knowledge and truth. Using the US pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma as a case study, Watson argues that epistemic rights violations harm individuals, diminish the quality of the debate, and lead to increased polarization.

LANI WATSON is a Research Fellow with the Oxford Character Project at the University of Oxford. Her research is in applied social and virtue epistemology, with a focus on the nature and value of questioning.

AIDAN MCGLYNN is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses mainly on issues in epistemology, particularly where it intersects with other areas such as the philosophies of language and mind, and social and feminist philosophy.

Aidan McGlynn (AM): In your work, you make a case for the importance of the notion of epistemic rights. But this isn't a particularly familiar phrase to us in law or politics or other areas of social significance. How do you understand the notion of epistemic rights and what are some examples of the kind of phenomena you’re trying to understand in these terms?

Lani Watson (LW): The term “epistemic” has always been a hard sell outside of academia, and I think that is a great shame because it is a very useful term. We can use it much more widely outside of universities and the academy than we in fact do. Epistemic rights are simply rights to epistemic goods like information, knowledge, understanding, truth, maybe even wisdom. They are rights that concern these epistemic goods and, in particular, they are rights that govern and protect the quality, the accessibility, and the distribution of these goods. As an example, take the right to know the results of a medical test.

Can we find a way through and even around the messy “gender wars” currently raging on-and offline? A 2021 profile of Finn Mackay in The Guardian described them as “the writer hoping to help end the gender wars”. However, in the days leading up to this conversation in early April 2022, the UK government reneged on their promise to ban conversion therapy for trans people and Finn acknowledges that the gender wars have significantly worsened in the time following the publication of their book, Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars, in 2021. In this conversation, Finn explores the histories of feminist exclusions; the deepening political antagonism towards the trans community; the performance of gender; and much more.

Finn Mackay is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the West of England. A longstanding feminist activist, Finn founded the London Feminist Network in 2004 and is a frequent media commentator on feminist and LGBTQI+ topics.

Jana Bacevic is assistant professor at Durham University, UK, and member of the editorial board of The Philosopher. Her work is in social theory, philosophy of science, and political economy of knowledge production, with particular emphasis on the relationship between epistemological, moral and political elements.

Jana Bacevic (JB): Your recent work has drawn attention to the fact that the so-called “gender wars” have a longer intellectual history than most people realize. What are some of the key points in the history of this debate, especially when it comes to the UK and the US?

Finn Mackay (FM): There are many different lineages here, but Iwill focus on the feminist history. I come from a political background of organizing in the women's liberation movement and the women's peace movement. I have worked with radical feminists and radical feminist organizations, and I have learned a lot from radical feminists and revolutionary feminists, who themselves had been active in legacy building, protest and legal campaigning back in the 1970s and 1980s. I have also been involved in LGBT organizing and queer community-building for a long time.

As a result, I have been especially saddened to see radical feminism, a politics that I identified with and resonated with, being used in name to beat other minoritized groups: trans, transgender and queer people. There is a lot of misunderstanding about what radical feminism is generally, and particularly on this question.

Misanthropy – the moral condemnation of humankind – is very topical these days. There are many inspirations for a sense of the collective awfulness of humankind, from the failures to act on the global environmental crisis to the rise of far-right ideologies to the avoidable mass suffering of billions of humans and animals. But philosophers rarely talk about misanthropy as a doctrine. When they do, it is usually narrowly defined as a hatred of human beings or coupled to extreme proposals. In this conversation, Ian James Kidd offers an overview of philosophical misanthropy, including his own definition (“the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be”), addresses some common misconceptions, considers the shortcomings of Rutger Bregman's “Homo puppy” brand of optimism, and clarifies how – and why – one may wish to be a misanthrope.

IAN JAMES KIDD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in intellectual virtue and vice, the nature of a religious life, illness and mortality, misanthropy, and South and East Asian philosophies.

ANTHONY MORGAN has run out of new things to say about himself by this point.

Anthony Morgan (AM): Let's start with a simple question: why misanthropy?

Ian James Kidd (IJK): Misanthropy might not be an easy topic to get into, because the subject is of course intrinsically negative. I define misanthropy as the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be. For a misanthrope, humankind as it has come to be is morally atrocious. For all sorts of philosophical and psychological reasons, that's not an attractive thesis for many people. I’m not temperamentally misanthropic myself. My engagement with the subject was through the work of my former Durham colleague, David Cooper. In 2018 he wrote a short book, Animals and Misanthropy, arguing that honest reflection on the exploitation and abuse of animals by humankind justifies a charge of misanthropy. Most people are familiar with misanthropy as a general concept or idea, but it has never been one that philosophers have really taken seriously. Moral philosophers might describe themselves as realists or sentimentalists or contractarians or utilitarians, but rarely as misanthropes.

We begin with those who bear the greatest burdens of our current reality – those who remain violated, exploited, marginalized and powerless – and the systems of oppression – patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism (to invoke the unholy trinity) – that generate and sustain these burdens.

Gender theorist Paisley Currah argues that prison abolition, the adoption of free universal healthcare, and a large-scale assault on income inequality “would make the most difference to the most trans people”. To riff on Simone de Beauvoir, no oppressed population can be free until all oppressed populations are free. As I write, however, feminists remain divided over the status of trans people, while white working-class Americans continue to accept the psychological “wages of whiteness” rather than unify their interests with those of poor Black Americans.

After a long, overlooked history, the theory of intersectionality finally broke onto the global stage in the late 1980s.

Through emphasizing the intersections between different dimensions of oppression, it opened up the possibility of challenging the idea of a single axis of oppression, showing that all axes of oppression are inextricably linked. But how many axes are there, and how far do they reach not just into human life, but into animal and vegetal life?

In the midst of all this, certain oppressed populations continue to be overlooked. Psychiatric populations, for example, experience some of the most appalling and inhumane treatment imaginable, and yet Mad activism remains a movement that few activists engage with – or even know about. How widely can the reach of human compassion and solidarity be extended?

“In oppression, the oppressor oppresses himself ”. The most dangerous populations are those who are oppressed but fail to recognize their own oppression; reaffirming their identity at the expense of others is their legacy to the world.

To paraphrase Lewis R. Gordon, the biggest enemy of oppression is the realization of its irrelevance; the result is individual oppressors without the structures of oppression. What, then, are the conditions of possibility for the irrelevance of oppression?

There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the civil rights movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. However, as political theorist Erin R. Pineda argues below, this familiar account of civil rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgements about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics. This conversation coincided with the publication of Pineda's book, Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement. It looks at civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist rather than the dominant liberal political theorists, raising numerous important questions about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present.

ERIN R. PINEDA is Assistant Professor of Government at Smith College, Massachusetts. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and twentieth-century American political development.

ROBIN CELIKATES is Professor of Social Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the editorial team of Critical Times. He specializes in critical theory, civil disobedience, democracy, collective action, recognition, migration and citizenship, and methodological questions in political and social philosophy.

Robin Celikates (RC): I think it is fair to say that civil disobedience is back on the agenda, both on the streets – with Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, anti-austerity movements, and so on – and as a topic for philosophical discussion. And it raises a lot of fascinating theoretical questions, from definitional questions that ask what civil disobedience is and how it differs from other forms of protest, to questions of justification and legitimacy, to questions about its role within more or less democratic systems. Your recent work has focused around a critique of mainstream political theory, especially of liberalism. Despite being a very narrow perspective, liberalism has been hegemonic in political theory for quite some time. But it appears to be losing its hegemonic grip.

The Philosopher ran a series of three events in partnership with Adam Ferner's and Darren Chetty's podcast “Do You Even Vegan?” scheduled to coincide with each of the three daily meals, and the “breakfast guest” was Dutch philosopher, novelist, and artist Eva Meijer, a pioneering thinker on the political rights of animals. In this conversation, Meijer argues that the political turn in animal philosophy allows us to look at animals not just from an ethical perspective but also from a political perspective, which opens up many new and difficult questions about how to form democracies with other animals and how to conceive of them as political groups. For Meijer, a true interspecies democracy will only be possible if humans begin to listen in a different way to animals and to the natural world. Crucially, such a listening is not just for their survival but also for our own.

EVA MEIJER is an artist and postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and the author of many books, including Animal Languages and When Animals Speak.

DARREN CHETTY is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children's literature and hip hop culture.

ADAM FERNER is a writer and youth worker based in London. His books include The Philosopher's Library (with Chris Meyns) and Notes from the Crawl Room.

Adam Ferner (AF): You argue that humans massively underappreciate the extent to which non-human animals are engaged in intelligent and meaningful communication. For example, you describe Prairie dogs meeting each other with a “French kiss” and the extensive greeting ritual monogamous seabirds perform with their partners when they return to their nest, with the males often bringing gifts for the females such as flowers to decorate their nest or to use as a necklace. These descriptions offer a picture of non-human animals with human characteristics – French kissing, gift giving, and so on. But does this not run the risk of flattening non-human animal interactions by likening – or reducing – them to human interactions?

Eva Meijer (EM): The first answer would be that denying certain capacities to non-human animals is an ideological construction that has been very popular in animal research. The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal called this “anthropo-denial”

The earth, along with everything that lives and thinks on it, is at an advanced stage of being converted into a dump for industrial output and its by-products feeding consumerism and its excesses. So argues Michael Marder in his 2020 book, Dump Philosophy. In this conversation, Marder discusses the scope of his account of “dumpology”; the nihilistic, depressing affect that pervades the book and his wish to come up with a language for speaking about the sublime, uncanny and devastating transformation through which we are living; the possibility of emerging forms of solidarity between humans and non-human forms of life like animals and plants; and the irony of humans recognizing ourselves in the Anthropocene.

MICHAEL MARDER is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory and phenomenology.

SOFIA LEMOS is a curator and writer. She is Curator at TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Her writings on contemporary art and culture have featured in publications such as Art Agenda, Document Journal, Spike and MOUSSE as well as in several catalogues and monographs.

Sofia Lemos (SL): I am interested in the intersecting trajectories in your work. On the one hand, you have explored in depth the idea of plant thinking and being, of vegetality, but another strand of your work deals with ideas related to energy and entropy, dust and decay. Your work seems to create a delicate balance, or perhaps a generative friction, between decay and regeneration, hopefulness and nihilism. Would you agree with this statement, and where would your recent book Dump Philosophy fit within these trajectories?

Michael Marder (MM): Dump Philosophy is the other pole of vegetable thinking or plant thinking. In the dump, the very connection between growth and decay has been undone, and it is this that allows the dump to grow by accretion, because it is an accumulation of things that do not decay, decompose, or open the space and the time for future growth. Plants, of course, do the exact opposite: they are the very living bonds between growth and decay. There is no vegetable growth without decay, and there is no decay without vegetable growth.

What would need to be involved if we want our future robots to be anything more than quiz show champions, phenomenal chess players, and highly efficient killers? An influential answer from many corners of contemporary cognitive science is a body very much like ours, with our needs, desires, pleasures, pains, our kinds of habits, expertise, significance, care, and meaning, our cultural knowledge, practical know-how, and so on. In other words, nothing short of “real meat” embodiment will do. With his characteristic flair and mastery of a great diversity of philosophical traditions, in this conversation Peter Wolfendale clarifies the “real meat” hypothesis and defends the feasibility of isolated human brains animating androids from a distance and distributed artificial intellects inhabiting human bodies from the cloud – without sacrificing any of the cognitive capacities enabled by embodiment.

Peter Wolfendale is an independent philosopher living in the North East of England and the author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes (2019). His influential blog/website is: https://deontologistics.co.

ANTHONY MORGAN is, among other things, the editor of this book.

Anthony Morgan (AM): Please can you start by saying a few things about the rise of embodiment within contemporary philosophy? It seems to me to be mainly used as a corrective against: (1) the Cartesian notion of an immaterial mind, and (2) the materialist tendency to place the mind in the brain. But what are the main positive claims that defenders of embodiment are making?

Peter Wolfendale (PW): I think that the meaning of the term “embodiment” in philosophical circles is deceptively diverse, and that those who champion the concept are motivated by concerns that overlap less than is often appreciated. If they are unified by one thing, it is a rogues’ gallery of common enemies. Although Descartes is the most reviled of these, his errors are often traced back to some original sin perpetrated by Plato. However, in order to make sense of these conceptual crimes, it is worth first distinguishing the explanatory concerns of cognitive science and artificial intelligence from the normative concerns of political and social theory, while acknowledging that both of these are downstream from more general metaphysical concerns regarding the difference and/or relation between matter and mind.

This conversation with Elizabeth Anderson asks what it means to be a democratic citizen in a time when we find ourselves divided not only over values, but over facts. As lies, propaganda and fake news have hijacked political discourse on polarizing issues and distracted the electorate from constructive engagement of the problems we face, Anderson looks to thinkers like John Dewey and Susan Neiman in order to reframe democracy as a kind of culture that must be kept alive through civil society.

ELIZABETH ANDERSON is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in moral and political philosophy, social and feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

ALEXIS PAPAZOGLOU is an Editor at the Institute of Art and Ideas, London and host of “The Philosopher & The News” podcast. He writes on the intersection between philosophy, politics and current affairs.

Alexis Papazoglou (AP): In his inauguration speech, President Biden said, “Let's begin to listen to one another, hear one another, see one another, show respect for one another”. Your 2019 Uehiro Lectures at the University of Oxford are about the ethics of communication, and you try to articulate the conditions that would make possible a constructive discourse across political and identity divides in order to enhance our democracy. One of the things you focus on is what has gone wrong with our discourse around facts, with talk of “alternative facts”, “fake news”, and even a “post-truth era” in which a shared reality of facts is no longer available as a starting point for political discourse. How did we arrive here?

Elizabeth Anderson (EA): This kind of polarization of facts has been going on for several decades now. Much of it was initially driven by right-wing media, but the more recent driving force has been social media and their use of algorithms to amplify polarizing voices and outrage. The algorithms have discovered that polarizing discourse holds people's attention on these sites, and the longer you pay attention to something, the more money social media companies make on their advertisements. So those are the voices that get amplified. How do you generate polarization? By telling lies or presenting facts in a very misleading way that arouses fear and anger.

Our Euromodern philosophical inheritance via thinkers like Hobbes, Locke and Mill is of an atomistic and non-relational being who thinks, acts and moves along a course in which continued movement depends on not colliding with others. In this conversation, Lewis R. Gordon proposes a relational model of humanity inherited from southern Africa, Asia, South America, and even parts of continental Europe. For Gordon, this relational understanding of ourselves allows for the opening up and transformation of the possibilities of being human, all the way through to rethinking our institutional and political relations. While the Euromodern model views political commitment through the self-interested prism of success and failure, the relational model represents a profound critique of how most of us have come to fix action at an individual level. Seen in this light, Gordon argues that we must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it means to be human.

LEWIS R. GORDON is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His work spans Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education and philosophy of religion.

OLÚFÉ.MI O. TÁÍWÒ is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. His theoretical work draws from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of activism and activist thinkers.

Olúfé.mi O. Táíwò (OOT): In your work, political responsibility is something that goes beyond moral responsibility, and certainly beyond moralism. You use the example of Harriet Bailey to exemplify one model of political responsibility. Harriet Bailey was the mother of abolitionist and political thinker Frederick Douglass, and the two of them were separated at birth, which was a common aspect of chattel slavery at the time. When Douglass was around seven years old, Bailey found out that she was enslaved on a plantation 12 miles away from where he was growing up, and she walked the distance in the evenings to spend time with him into dawn, when she returned to the fields. Shortly after this, she died. Why do you see Harriet Bailey as an exemplar of your idea of political responsibility?

We all know that it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. One of the most compelling and ambitious philosophical attempts to snap us out of the solidifying inertia of “capitalist realism” is Martin Hägglund's 2019 book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. In this conversation between Hägglund and Lea Ypi (the only in-person event transcript in this volume), Hägglund builds his argument from an analysis of our most basics needs as humans, and contends that Marx is in fact the strongest defender of key liberal/Enlightenment values such as liberty and equality, and that commitment to such values must inevitably lead us to a world beyond capitalism.

MARTIN HÄGGLUND is Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. A member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, he is the author of four highly acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into eight languages.

LEA YPI is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include normative political theory, Enlightenment political thought and critical theory.

Lea Ypi (LY): I thought I would start by situating Marx, and Martin's reading of Marx, within a particular tradition and within the traditional way in which we think about that tradition. The tradition I have in mind is the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment conception of reason and free agency as something that unfolds in history, through which we reappropriate the world we inhabit, through which we are able to criticize foreign, alien instances like religion or natural circumstances. These are all familiar thoughts in the Enlightenment, carried forward in the Hegelian appropriation of the Enlightenment thinkers. The caricature understanding of Marx is that he was someone who had read the Enlightenment thinkers, who had read Hegel, who was very inspired by the German idealist tradition to which Hegel belonged, but that he was also a rebel, someone who was exposed to different traditions of thought, such as the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the British empiricists, and became more concerned with day-to-day questions like what we eat, how we reproduce ourselves, how we live in communities – the kinds of day-to-day questions that the German poet Bertolt Brecht captured nicely in his phrase, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” (“First comes eating food, and then morality follows after”).

What can the enigmatic early modern philosopher Baruch Spinoza contribute to our thinking about the climate crisis, and specifically, our thinking about the emotions generated by it? In this conversation, Beth Lord argues that for Spinoza, that which increases human action and thinking is good, and deriving energy from fossil fuels has been a very great human good over the past 400 years. But we now understand our reliance on fossil fuels to be bad for our flourishing and that of other forms of life on earth. We can no longer rejoice in the consideration of collective human power; instead, we now fear its devastating predicted effects. What are the implications of this fear of our own power? What confusions does this fear emerge from? And how can we correct and clarify our emotional response to the climate crisis, especially the future-oriented emotions of hope and fear?

Beth Lord is a philosopher and professor in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She specializes in the history of philosophy, especially the work and influence of Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza, as well as contemporary continental philosophy.

Chris Meyns is a poet, developer and architectural conservationist based in Uppsala, Sweden. They have published on the history of data, on Anton Wilhelm Amo's philosophy of mind, and the legacy of the philosophical canon.

Chris Meyns (CM): The climate emergency is very much alive to us right now. We are already noticing global heating, species going extinct, ice caps melting, floods and droughts. Spinoza, by contrast, lived in the seventeenth century, and didn't write about this catastrophic process. Maybe he did not foresee that anything like this might ever happen. What got you thinking about linking this seventeenth-century philosopher to this urgent contemporary topic?

Beth Lord (BL): The key idea that is relevant here is Spinoza's naturalism, as this really challenges how we think about the Anthropocene and the climate emergency. Spinoza is a monist, so he believes that all of being is one being, and this one being is called “God or Nature”. Individual things like human beings and objects and animals and plants are not independent substances; rather we’re the changing “modes”, or ways of being, of “God or Nature”.

Historically, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even some radical feminists have conflated femininity and submission. This conversation coincided with the publication of Manon Garcia's book We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives. For Garcia, what we call femininity in our patriarchal societies is submission, but it does not have to be this way. Rather, the concept of submission serves to give meaning to what women have been experiencing under patriarchy, as well as the tools to politicize it. What emerges from this conversation is not only an inspiring call to women to resist, but also a lucid and accessible introduction to many of the most urgent questions in feminist philosophy.

MANON GARCIA is a junior professor of practical philosophy at Freie Universität in Berlin. Her primary research is in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, moral philosophy and philosophy of economics.

KATE KIRKPATRICK is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics at Regent's Park College, Oxford. She is an associate fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and treasurer of the UK Sartre Society.

Kate Kirkpatrick (KK): Much of your work looks at the concept of submission from a feminist perspective. Why do you think this concept deserves philosophical analysis?

Manon Garcia (MG): What we call femininity in our patriarchal societies is submission. Yet, unlike feminist theorists like Catharine MacKinnon, I don't think that this necessarily has to be the case. There is the possibility of redefining femininity in a way that is not synonymous with submission, but I take it that femininity and submission are the same for now. In this sense, I consider submission to be a, if not the, central concept for feminist philosophy to be addressing.

I felt very early on that a major problem with concepts like “oppression”, “domination” and “exploitation” is that they look at the power dynamic from the standpoint of the people who have the power. And this leads to a problem, especially in the case of women, which is that their situation comes to be associated with passivity. People come to think that male domination means that women are passive.

The Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (205–270 CE) insisted that philosophy should be concerned with nothing less than το τιμιώτατον (pronounced “to timiotaton”), generally translated as what matters most. Writing in the twentieth century, the Russian existentialist Lev Shestov considers this to be “the best and only complete definition of philosophy”. I’m pretty sure, however, that neither Plotinus nor Shestov would consider this volume to be το τιμιώτατον. After all, it does not follow their lead in seeking the transcendent, prophetic or mystical through the philosophical. Come to think of it, they may not consider it a work of philosophy at all.

Is living an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. “The art of living” has been captured by retreat centres, wellness escapes, therapy rooms. It brings to mind virtue, happiness, peace, mindfulness, freedom. This volume, by contrast, seeks the art of living in the midst of all the spectacular messiness generated by an aggressive, violent, anxiety-ridden, acquisitive, cruel and lustful species. The conversations that follow are rooted in those questions that matter most to us as citizens of increasingly fractious societies and inhabitants of an increasingly fractured planet: How do we cultivate the art of living under oppression when this oppression may be permanent? (Part I); How do we cultivate the art of living together when the cocoon-like embrace of our echo chamber feels so attractive? (Part II); How do we cultivate the art of living with technology in the face of prophecies of a forthcoming AI apocalypse? (Part III); and How do we cultivate the art of living through crisis when the climate catastrophe has served to shatter any illusion of solidarity or a common world? (Part IV).

In autumn 2020, The Philosopher launched its first series of free “digital dialogues” after our in-person events in the UK were cancelled due to the pandemic. These events have proven surprisingly successful, with over 12,000 attendees from 109 countries tuning in to date. This attests to an ongoing (ineradicable?) public desire to participate in rich philosophical explorations of important contemporary questions. Most of the conversations that follow are edited transcripts of these events.

As Sage Cammers-Goodwin highlights in the conversation below, isn't it curious that those who are seen to fulfil the manufactured tech ideal of intelligence are “so denuded of emotion or caring”? We seem to take it for granted that the most socially and politically prized forms of intelligence lack “those characteristics, such as attentiveness and concern for others, that we routinely connect with being a good human being”. What, then, if the much-hyped AI technologies that are promised to be inveigling themselves into ever more intimate corners of our lives are simply an inorganic extension of this highly limited and gendered fantasy of intellectual life as pure information processing? This conversation considers these questions and many more besides, with the aim of clarifying the ethical and societal impact of AI.

Stephen Cave is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His research is mostly in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on the ethics of AI/robotics and the philosophy of (im) mortality.

Sage Cammers-Goodwin is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente. Her research bridges philosophy and computer science, focusing on smart cities, and stakeholder interests and interactions in implementing “smart” enhancements to cities.

Sage Cammers-Goodwin (SC-G): What do you consider to be the main problem with intelligence, or the history of intelligence, that introduces it as a matter of philosophical concern? Stephen Cave (SC): Intelligence is such a part of our everyday discourse. This is reflected in assumptions that some people are more intelligent than others, that this matters for what they can or should do, and that this is measurable. But these ideas are quite new. The term “intelligence” wasn't widely used in English until the end of the nineteenth century, and it really rose to prominence with intelligence testing from the start of the twentieth century. It quickly became hugely important because it was useful to a wide range of other political and economic projects. When the term “AI” was coined back in 1955, it was very much trying to ride that particular wave.

So the first thing to emphasize is the need to contextualize and problematize the concept of intelligence. Instead of asking, “What does this concept mean?”

As actress Gal Gadot found out to her cost in assuming that “we’re all in this together” during her preamble to the widely ridiculed celebrity rendition of John Lennon's “Imagine” in the early days of the global pandemic, there is a certain recklessness in harbouring any great ambitions for the first-person plural.

In asking, “What Is We?” in her 2020 essay for The Philosopher, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan captures the tension that lies at the heart of any assumption of shared subjectivity, perspective, or experience. More conventional forms of that question, such as “who are we?” or “what are we?” take it for granted that “we” already are. Srinivasan, however, is not convinced.

It is a commonplace that universalisms exclude. The pseudouniversalisms that shape the modern world blur the interests of the powerful with the interests of all. The ever-expanding call for rights and recognition from the excluded is at the same time a call to keep the universalist promise. But what if modernity is in fact constituted by its exclusions? Where are we to go from here?

The felt absence of a common world in our time of radical upheaval has led to interpersonal and political deadlock. The twin crises of Covid-19 and anthropogenic climate change have not served to collectivize us; rather, they have served to amplify the staggering differentials of power and advantage that could more easily be papered over in normal times.

Amidst all this, can we cultivate an art of living together, however provisional and unstable? There is no art of polarization, to be sure (just look at Twitter). Rather, the art of living together involves reaching out across ever-expanding categories of difference – human, non-human, vegetal, robotic, earthly. And despite emerging narratives of relationality and interdependence from feminism to physics, nothing feels harder. The cocoon-like embrace of our echo chamber feels terribly attractive when faced with “them” in all their strange, inscrutable otherness.

Polarization is easy, but, to quote Spinoza, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.