Stefano Franchi

What if life itself is fundamentally passive, contingent, driven by passions rather than rational mastery? The Passion of Life radically reimagines human existence by challenging philosophy’s traditional hierarchies of action over passivity, necessity over contingency. This ambitious three-volume project begins with Philosophy’s Ends, which demonstrates how philosophy’s proclaimed "end" reveals its essential connection to play. Through close readings of Hegel and Lévi-Strauss, the volume exposes a critical paradox: play-based conceptions of life collapse unless we abandon the false dichotomy between activity and passivity. Tracing passivity from Aristotle through post-Classical and modern debates on the passions, the volume recovers "receptivity" as the ground for understanding human life as intrinsically passive and contingent. Life, described (Volume 2) examines how cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and psychoanalysis reveal life as a passive, contingent phenomenon, while Life, lived (Volume 3) explores what such existence looks like through Christian mysticism and socio-political critique. Engaging contemporary biology, evolutionary robotics, and European philosophy, this work offers a provocative alternative to humanist assumptions about agency, autonomy, and control—a vision of life embraced rather than transcended through its vulnerability and openness to chance.

The book brings into relief the variety of approaches and disciplines that have informed the quest for a theory of cognition. The center of interest are the historical, geographical, and theoretical peripheries of classic AI’s mainstream research program. The twelve chapters bring back into focus the variety of strategies and theoretical questions that researchers explored while working toward a scientific theory of cognition and pre-cognition. The volume is organized in four parts, each one including three essays. The first one deals with cybernetics, the approach that may be considered as the most important periphery of classic AI research. The second part focuses on the geographical periphery of AI research. It examines how the theories and techniques developed on AI’s home ground were translated into countries with different cultures and traditions: Italy, France, and the Soviet Union. The third part focuses on AI’s periphery understood in the cultural and historical meaning of the term. It contains essays that locate some of the central concepts of AI, like representation and computability, within a broader philosophical (Descartes, Aristotle, Leibniz) and technical background (programming theory and practice). The fourth and final part of the volume is focused directly on the limitation of Turing’s classic computability theory and its possible alternatives, some of which were studied i n the early years of AI’s research (e.g. Ashby’s re-entrant information model), while others have been intensely studied in recent times (quantum automata).

Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds brings together key writings from researchers in AI and scholars in the humanities to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of both areas. The AI community, for example, could benefit from explorations of human intelligence a nd creativity by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, literary critics, and others, while analysis of AI’s theoretical struggles and technical advances could yield insights into such traditional humanist concerns as the nature of rationality and the mind-body dichotomy. The contributions include a continuation of the famous Hubert Dreyfus-Daniel Dennett debate over Kasparov’s defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue; Philip Agre’s tracing of difficulties in AI research to the inherited tensions of Cartesian dualism; Evelyn Fox Keller’s examination of the development of computer technology in relation to biology; Douglas Hofstadter’s argument that thinking is more than the theorem-solving activities of AI; and Alison Adam’s discussion of the implicitly male universal subject used in AI.