Idle Talk: Dasein and the Inauthentic Machine

The release of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has been controversial on multiple levels. It raises fundamental political, economic, environmental and moral challenges. Intersecting these concerns is a troubling lack of consensus over exactly what this novel technology is. For some it puts us on the verge of so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), for others it is an interesting but flawed tech demo. For one set of critics, it threatens our jobs through its ability to automate mundane tasks; for another, it threatens nothing less than the end of human civilisation. That this technology is experienced simultaneously as useless toy, helpful tool and existential threat indicates a failure to truly grasp its nature. I wish to demonstrate that this profound ambivalence and ambiguity around the nature of this technology results from a failure to ask the correct question. We should not ask what GAI is, but who?

In Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that Dasein must always be referred to by a personal pronoun. It is a who, not a what. And while I fundamentally reject any suggestion that GAI or even the sought-after AGI is or could be 'sentient', when adopting the typical Cartesian framing of these discussions, categorial interpretation — i.e. seeing GAI as a mere thing, present-at-hand — will not tell us anything we do not already assume. GAI is a statistical image of Dasein, and while an image of Dasein is not Dasein, neither is it a mere thing. Indeed, we need little experience in using GAI tools to recognise the peculiar ambiguity that they are neither ready-to-hand nor un-ready-to-hand: oscillating between handy and obstructive. Ambiguity is at the core of our experience of these tools, and nothing less than an existential interpretation of GAI, of which this talk will offer a sketch, will offer a chance to understand the being of this new machine. I will argue that GAI is an image of the they-self: Dasein in its most public, most levelled-down and least authentic.

Matthew J. Barnard is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has written on Heidegger, Bergson, and Kant, and he is the author of Heidegger’s Conception of Freedom: Beyond Cause and Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He serves on the Executive Committee of the British Society for Phenomenology and edits its podcast. He is currently working on the phenomenology of technology.

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God Truth Justice. Heidegger, Levinas and the Aporias of Redemption

Abstract coming soon

Joseph Cohen has authored Le spectre juif de Hegel (Paris, Galilée, 2005), Le sacrifice de Hegel (Paris, Galilée, 2007 ; Italian transl. Il Sacrificio di Hegel, Milan, Mimesis, 2025), Alternances de la métaphysique. Essais sur E. Levinas (Paris, Galilée, 2009) and co-authored, with D. Moran, The Husserl Dictionary (London, Bloomsbury, 2012) and with R. Zagury-Orly, L’adversaire privilégié. Heidegger, les Juifs et nous (Paris, Galilée, 2022). Forthcoming publications include The Levinas Dictionary (London, Bloomsbury, 2026) and Heidegger and the “Jewish” Question (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2027). He leads the “Jewish Thought and Contemporary Philosophy” Research Project at the Newman Centre for the Study of Religions (School of Philosophy, University College Dublin). His philosophical research is focused on contemporary continental philosophy and the questions of sacrifice and history, Judaism and Antijudaism/Antisemitism in the history of philosophy, forgiveness and alterity, truth and justice. 

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“Swinging and Swaying”: Salvation, God, and the Appropriating Event

Taking its cue from Heidegger’s Spiegel interview remark “Only a god can still save us,” this paper probes the significance of the remark by examining what, on Heidegger’s terms, salvation might mean, what sort of God – if not what God – might save us, and what is left to us to do in order to be saved. The paper discusses, too, how Heidegger views this soteriology as a matter of God and humanity appropriating one another, as exemplified by Hölderlin’s depiction of the holy feast that witnesses and celebrates their encounter. The paper concludes that, by Heidegger’s own admission, a specific religious experience and his post-metaphysical conception of being as the appropriating event are necessarily joined at the hip, each entailing the other.

Daniel O. Dahlstrom, the John R. Silber Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, is the author of several books and articles on the thought of Martin Heidegger, including the revised edition of The Heidegger Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is the first Presiding Officer of the Heidegger Circle and currently serves as co-editor (with Filippo Casati) of Cambridge University Press’ Heidegger Elements series.  In addition to translating Heidegger’s first Marburg lectures (1923), he has translated works of Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel, Feuerbach, Husserl, Landmann-Kalischer into English.

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Heidegger and the Cybernetic Hypothesis

“No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and piloted by the new fundamental science which is called cybernetics. This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being.”  At the time of Heidegger’s statement, “cybernetics is forced to acknowledge that, at least for the time being, a complete regulation of human existence is not yet possible.”  Since then, in 1966, the cybernetic transfiguration of human existence has arguably further sharpened the thrust of Heidegger's less than sanguine observation.

What remained implied in Heidegger’s contention was the transformative effect of media technology for social and political existence. Pursuing these implications was left to Günther Anders, who, more than any other thinker, recognized the epochal significance of the two inseparable phenomena of modern media and cybernetics. In his lecture, I propose an elaboration of Heidegger's reflections on the essence of modern technology through the theoretical channels of Anders' The Obsolescence of the Human and the anarchist imaginary Tiqqun's The Cybernetic Hypothesis. 

I have published four books: Husserl and the Promise of Time (2010), A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (2018), Original Forgiveness (2020), and German Philosophy and the First World War (2023). I am currently working on two book projects: a phenomenology of the afterlife that examines different senses in which, whether individually, collectively, or historically, the dead haunt the living; a study of the impact of the First World War on Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. I am in the final stages of completing two co-authored books: The Erosion of Trust and Truthfulness in the Age of Democratic Uncertainty and We Nuclear People: Responsibility for Nuclear Waste in the Vastness of Time. I have published widely in the areas of phenomenology, ethics, 19th and 20th century philosophy, aesthetics, political philosophy, and literature.

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Why Heidegger?

Abstract coming soon

Anthony Stadlen was born in 1940. He trained as an existential analyst with Aaron Esterson, John Heaton, R.D. Laing, Peter Lomas. He worked in psychiatric hospitals, and has practised privately since 1970. He is recognised as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist by the British Psychotherapy Foundation, an existential psychotherapist by the Society for Existential Analysis, and a daseinsanalyst by the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis; but his method is individual and unique.  Since 1977 he has studied the foundations of “psychotherapy” through historically researching paradigmatic “cases”: Freud’s Cäcilie M.; Katharina; Dora; Rat Man; Binswanger’s Ellen West; Layard’s Lady of the Hare; Fordham’s Golden Baby; Boss’s Dr Cobling and Regula Zürcher; Laing and Esterson’s eleven families in “Sanity, Madness and the Family”. His research was sponsored by the Philosophy Department, University of Essex, and the Nuffield Foundation. He has lectured on his research at Regent's College and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London, and in a number of countries. Since 1996 he has convened the Inner Circle Seminars (now more than 300): an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in “psychotherapy”. He is a former Research Fellow of the Freud Museum, London, and an Honorary Visiting Fellow  of Regent’s University, London. He received the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Services to the Cause of Civil Liberties.

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Measures for Living. On the Normativity of Things and Works

Human beings need measure. Measures guide us and coordinate our doing and valuing so that we can live well. Measure is at the heart of normativity. But Heidegger affirms Hölderlin’s claim that “there is no measure on earth,” neither found nor given. Still human beings need to take on measure; measure is necessary for delimiting a place and for holding up the open of the truth of art; measure is central to both building and poetry. 

This talk takes as its starting point “…dichterisch wohnet der Mensch” and “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” two essays from 1951 where Heidegger presents us with a seemingly tragic situation: measure is both necessary and impossible. We live in a time with much calculation, but no guiding measure, and what we need to measure ourselves against is unknown. It is difficult not to think that Heidegger leaves us with a choice between voluntaristic hubris or blind arbitrariness. I want to show how Heidegger’s notion of measure-taking is a companion to the truth-event and that his response to this seemingly tragic situation is hope and grace.

Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oslo. She works on topics aesthetics in the Post-Kantian tradition and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger especially. She has published on sculpture, painting, modernism and the body in art. She is the author of the Cambridge Element Heidegger on Art (2026).

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