Throughout the text, the term “human” often appears without a definite article in order to emphasize its meaning as a singular universal which makes sense of its mode of being by inhabiting collectivizing or universalizing processes. This is “human” not by virtue of being a biological species, but rather by virtue of being a generic subject or a commoner before what brings about its singularity and universality. Accordingly, human, as Jean-Paul Sartre points out, is universal by the singular universality of human history, and it is also singular by the universalizing singularity of the projects it undertakes.
See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 387.
See Michael Ferrer, Human Emancipation and ‘Future Philosophy’ (UK: Urbanomic, 2015, forthcoming).
Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 191.
See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics,” in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside ([Name] Publications, 2013). Also available online at →
See Paul A. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
See Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Pearson Education, 1973).
For an account of the connection between philosophy and artificial intelligence, see David Deutsch, “Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence,” The Guardian, October 3, 2012 →
Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theater (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 52.
William C. Wimsatt, Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
For detailed and technical definitions of processes and mechanisms, see Johanna Seibt, “Forms of emergent interaction in General Process Theory,” Synthese vol. 166, no. 3 (February 2009): 479–512; and Carl F. Craver, “Role Functions, Mechanisms, and Hierarchy,” Philosophy of Science vol. 68, no. 1 (March 2001): 53–74.
Manipulation conditionals are specific forms of general conditionals that express various causal and explanatory combinations of antecedents and consequents (if… then…) in terms of interventions or manipulable hypotheses. For example a simple manipulation conditional is: If x were to be manipulated under a set of parameters W, it would behave in the manner of y. For a theory of causal and explanatory intervention, see James Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
For a realist take on complexity, see James Ladyman, James Lambert, and Karoline Wiesner, “What is a complex system?”European Journal for Philosophy of Science vol. 3, no. 1 (January 2013): 33–67. And for more details, see Remo Badii and Antonio Politi, Complexity: Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
See William C. Wimsatt, Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings.
My thanks to Michael Ferrer, Brian Kuan Wood, Robin Mackay, Benedict Singleton, Peter Wolfendale, and many others who either through suggestions or conversations have contributed to this text. Whatever merit this essay might have is due to them, while its shortcomings on the other hand are entirely mine.