Call for Papers n. LXVI/1 – Thinking Machines/Thinking with Machines
- Mar 20
- 3 min read
Deadline: September 20, 2026
The editorial board of the philosophical journal «Il Pensiero» selects original contributions in essay form for the issue dedicated to the topic:
Thinking Machines/Thinking with Machines
The deadline for submission of the contributions is September 20, 2026; the response of the editorial board will be communicated possibly by January 24, 2027. The articles may be in one of the following languages: Italian, English, French, Spanish, German. Submissions should not exceed 45.000 characters, including spaces and footnotes, and should be accompanied by abstracts and 5 keywords (in the language in which the article is written and in English, maximum 1200 characters including spaces for each abstract).
The issue is scheduled for release in April 2027.
Volume editor: Michele Capasso – Pegaso Telematic University.
The ability of a machine – whether a computer or a robot – to perform tasks traditionally carried out by intelligent beings has made it possible to attribute artificial intelligence to it; when treated as a noun, such an ability has allowed and continues to allow us to speak of systems endowed with functions in some way comparable to the intellectual functions of human beings. Both the notion of “machine” and that of “intelligence” are, of course, philosophically problematic, and even more so is the way in which AI performs tasks that humans carry out through perception, language, learning, deliberate choice, or through awareness and control of one’s own movements. One may, of course, abandon the comparison altogether – and indeed one of the founders of AI, Alan Turing, did so when, in his famous test, he asked not what thinking is or whether a machine thinks, but simply whether its output is distinguishable from a human response. Nevertheless, it is far from obvious that the results of a given activity can always be distinguished from the activity itself, and that thinking, in particular, is of this kind. Since this is not obvious, the philosophical question – what does it mean to think? – cannot simply be set aside.
At the same time, it is equally unclear that this question can claim any kind of priority, that it can be pursued within the register familiar to philosophers – that of prolegomena, of things that must be said beforehand, that is, even before examining what actually takes place within the domain of cognitive technologies and the solutions concretely pursued in AI. Human beings have always thought “with” – they have always relied on supports, devices, and tools. If, as Foucault suggests, not every thought can be thought in every epoch, one might similarly propose that not every thought can be thought with every device («which thoughts are no longer possible to think?» may be an even more unsettling question than asking which thoughts we can think only today).
This becomes immediately evident when the question is applied to specific practices: how can one understand music apart from how it functions? How can one grasp artistic practices in general independently of their materials or techniques? Whether or not one has the possibility or the ability to concretely explore such domains, one must first of all accept this approach, which avoids dividing the field into two. Moreover, we cannot even interpret man as in opposition to the machine, or culture in opposition to technology – things that we know well – but we must probably also avoid assuming that within such oppositions (and others that function similarly: continuous/discrete, analog/digital, understanding/information) the first term represents fullness and contains a priori more (and is of greater value) than the second. That it represents the true and the whole, which the part – the parts, the data, the bits – can never fully restore, but instead merely simulate, ultimately impoverishing and falsifying it.
Are there other ways of thinking about this relationship, so decisive in all respects, that might help us avoid not only facile enthusiasm but equally facile nostalgia?
Thus this issue is intended to be structured along three interwoven directions: a critical re-reading of the categories through which philosophy has thought technology; an analysis of ongoing transformations as an ontology of the present; and the elaboration of theoretical hypotheses capable of bringing to light fundamental metaphysical questions, without presupposing a pre-established image of man or of technology.
Contributions that address, among others, the following areas: the essence of technology in the age of artificial intelligence; the ontological status of the technical object and processes of technogenesis (G. Simondon, B. Stiegler); the genealogy and archaeology of technical objects (M. Foucault, C. Sini); phenomenology and post-phenomenology of technology (D. Ihde); thought as a philosophical machine (G. Deleuze, R. Ronchi); transformations of space, language, and memory, and the Digital Humanities (W. Benjamin, A. Warburg, J. Schnapp) will be particularly welcomed.