Anti Humanism

Androids, if they were to come into existence, would be the outcome of scientific and engineering ingenuity and thus be products of past living labour. Although the androids might be Turing-compatible, Voight-Kammpf cheating and Asimov-law abiding, they would be dead labour. Indeed as outcomes of a capitalist production process they would surely be commodities, objectifying a quantity of value and have particular uses for business, comfort or pleasure. In other words, androids would be very advanced machinery and Marx is quite clear that machinery cannot produce surplus value.

Drawing on John Johnston’s (2008) analysis of artificial life theory and experiments, this paper will explore whether androids or artificially intelligent robots can create surplus value. It will do so by interrogating and critiquing the key Marxist categories of labour and value. In this science-fictional quest to discover value producing androids, I will consider Marx’s problematic vitalism or whether there is something else specific to Man that is necessary for his value theory. I will consider Marx’s vitalism, and the android from the point of view of the labour process and valorization process before suggesting that under certain conditions androids can in fact produce value. These conditions have nothing to do with the peculiarity of either Man or machine, but rather with what value is and how it functions in Marx’s theoretical framework. Although Marx could be charged with vitalism, I will conclude that this aspect of his theory can be understood as referring to the life of capital and that in this context labour is negentropic to capital’s entropy. An implication of this exploration is that capitalism is alive and that it could reproduce itself without the existence of the human race.

Edmund Husserl and Michel Foucault are two philosophers quite different from each other in terms of style and themes. While one may appreciate the first for a humanistic motive which materializes in an appeal to self-determination, such as what we find in his last great work, the second one is, on the contrary, well known for his “anti-humanism”. However, if the aim of Foucault’s research is put under examination, it's possible to discover that it is not after all so distant, in certain aspects, from the aim that animates Husserl’s reflections. For both, it is a matter of asking how we became what we are – to paraphrase Nietzsche – opening, thus, the road toward a different and free constitution of one’s self.
(Pubblicato in "In Circolo. Rivista di filosofie e culture": http://www.incircolorivistafilosofica.it/umanesimo-e-anti-umanesimo-tra-husserl-e-foucault/).

Bu yazida, Max Stirner 1806–1856 , Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900 ve Michel Foucault 1926–1984 arasindaki sira disi fakat henuz kesfedilmemis olan bir iliskiyi ‘tanrinin olumun’den ‘insanin olumu’ne uzanan baglantidan hareketle tartisacagim. Hegel’in uc dusunurun felsefelerinde de ortak bir dusman olarak mevcut bulundugunu ve bu dusunurler arasindaki sasirtici benzerliklerin onlari ayni istikamete iten post-Hegelyen felsefenin bir sonucu oldugunu one surecegim