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Urbanomic/Sequence Press
Intelligence and Spirit
The history of philosophy conceived as the elaboration of a program for artificial general intelligence; intelligence understood as the impersonal and collective evolution of a thought that constructs itself according to a view from nowhere and nowhen.
In Intelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things, a real movement capable of overcoming any state of affairs that, from the perspective of the present, may appear to be the complete totality of its history.
Building on Hegel’s account of geist as a multi-agent conception of mind and Kant’s transcendental psychology as a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of having mind, Negarestani provides a critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism.
This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions of German Idealism, and analytic philosophy in the form of extended thought-experiments and a philosophy of artificial languages, opens up new perspectives on the meaning of human intelligence, and explores the real potential of posthuman intelligence and what it means for us to live in its prehistory.
In Intelligence and Spirit Reza Negarestani formulates the ultimate form of intelligence as a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things, a real movement capable of overcoming any state of affairs that, from the perspective of the present, may appear to be the complete totality of its history.
Building on Hegel’s account of geist as a multi-agent conception of mind and Kant’s transcendental psychology as a functional analysis of the conditions of possibility of having mind, Negarestani provides a critique of both classical humanism and dominant trends in posthumanism.
This remarkable fusion of continental philosophy in the form of a renewal of the speculative ambitions of German Idealism, and analytic philosophy in the form of extended thought-experiments and a philosophy of artificial languages, opens up new perspectives on the meaning of human intelligence, and explores the real potential of posthuman intelligence and what it means for us to live in its prehistory.
592 pages, Paperback
First published September 21, 2018
80 people are currently reading
2827 people want to read
About the author
Reza Negarestani
34 books346 followersReza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer, known for "pioneering the genre of 'theory-fiction' with his book" Cyclonopedia which was published in 2008. it was listed in Artforum as one of the best books of 2009. Negarestani has been a regular contributor to Collapse (journal), as well as other print and web publications such as Ctheory. On March 11, 2011, faculty from Brooklyn College and The New School organized a symposium to discuss Cyclonopedia titled Leper Creativity. Later on in the year, Punctum books published a book with the same title that included essays, articles, artworks, and documents from or related to the symposium. In 2011, he co-edited Collapse's issue VII with Robin Mackay titled Culinary Materialism. In 2012, Negarestani collaborated with Florian Hecker on an artwork titled "Chimerization" that was included in the dOCUMENTA (13) exhibition.
After being associated with the philosophical movement of Speculative Realism for several years, Negarestani is currently lecturing and writing about rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct.
(from Wikipedia)
After being associated with the philosophical movement of Speculative Realism for several years, Negarestani is currently lecturing and writing about rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 5, 2019
This work is really only about AGI on the surface. Dissimulatively, one might say. Perhaps not on the surface, for it goes to the depths of the work and its thought and arguments. But Intelligence and Spirit is not about AGI. It is about the two entwined concepts that turn about the copula and compose the title. AGI is but a means of delving into and explicating the question of intelligence and what it is - it is an extended thought experiment.
For what is really of concern is the relation between intelligence and the intelligible, how intelligence develops and transforms based upon language aquisition and socially normative inferences. AGI and its production are but the means of explicating, via a "toy philosophy" which plays with concepts and thoughts so as to produce better models, what intelligence is for us. It is only in rendering explicitly thematic what intelligence is that we can overcome the limits of the human (for intelligence is not a property or possession of humanity - it is an inhuman force and production) and in a move of auto-obsolescence to produce what will supercede us. This movement of self-overcoming through self-effacing intelligence production is the defining factor of intelligence - as geistig force, it is impersonal, and moves through us towards the beyond. This is the Good - and it is philosophy's place to render explicit what intelligence is, and develop means to expand its domain, to write ourselves out of the program. As Plato supposedly put it, philosophy is learning to die well.
*
From Hegel to Sellars, Carnap to Kant, the way that wemds through this work is at once extensive and intense. I especially found interesting the excursus on time around the middle point of the book. Reza, as always (though in a drastically different form than in his early work), perverts or distorts the thought of those he comes into contact with, exposing the inhuman potencies which lie dormant in them. He turns thought roward itself in exposing its origins in an engagement with the world, fictively composing and (re-)inscribing itself as it comes to understand and (re-)compose its world and its existence. Langauge, in its neutral and anonymous workings, bound up with thought, shape not only our mode of being, but our becoming as well - our becoming-other; the alteration of intelligence which demands the sacrifice of the human in order to welcome the emergence of intelligence's next incarnation, whatever it may be.
The human is a prehistory for the futural becoming of intelligence. A humbling book, perpetually drawn forth by the force of death which, though often absent, remains latently at work, underwriting the work of thought and language. To make the unconscious abyss of our grounding conscious and intelligible - this could be viewed as Reza's goal, linking his early work with this book. A movement, then, which would involve the death of what we are in order to produce the unlife of the inhuman - to allow for further possibilities of instantiating the impossible potencies of infection and decay, the double movement of negation and construction which move between and compose the existence of intelligence and the intelligible.
For what is really of concern is the relation between intelligence and the intelligible, how intelligence develops and transforms based upon language aquisition and socially normative inferences. AGI and its production are but the means of explicating, via a "toy philosophy" which plays with concepts and thoughts so as to produce better models, what intelligence is for us. It is only in rendering explicitly thematic what intelligence is that we can overcome the limits of the human (for intelligence is not a property or possession of humanity - it is an inhuman force and production) and in a move of auto-obsolescence to produce what will supercede us. This movement of self-overcoming through self-effacing intelligence production is the defining factor of intelligence - as geistig force, it is impersonal, and moves through us towards the beyond. This is the Good - and it is philosophy's place to render explicit what intelligence is, and develop means to expand its domain, to write ourselves out of the program. As Plato supposedly put it, philosophy is learning to die well.
*
From Hegel to Sellars, Carnap to Kant, the way that wemds through this work is at once extensive and intense. I especially found interesting the excursus on time around the middle point of the book. Reza, as always (though in a drastically different form than in his early work), perverts or distorts the thought of those he comes into contact with, exposing the inhuman potencies which lie dormant in them. He turns thought roward itself in exposing its origins in an engagement with the world, fictively composing and (re-)inscribing itself as it comes to understand and (re-)compose its world and its existence. Langauge, in its neutral and anonymous workings, bound up with thought, shape not only our mode of being, but our becoming as well - our becoming-other; the alteration of intelligence which demands the sacrifice of the human in order to welcome the emergence of intelligence's next incarnation, whatever it may be.
The human is a prehistory for the futural becoming of intelligence. A humbling book, perpetually drawn forth by the force of death which, though often absent, remains latently at work, underwriting the work of thought and language. To make the unconscious abyss of our grounding conscious and intelligible - this could be viewed as Reza's goal, linking his early work with this book. A movement, then, which would involve the death of what we are in order to produce the unlife of the inhuman - to allow for further possibilities of instantiating the impossible potencies of infection and decay, the double movement of negation and construction which move between and compose the existence of intelligence and the intelligible.
November 30, 2019
Some reviewers have already mentioned that it would be interesting to compare the Negarestani of Cyclonopedia with the Negarestani of Intelligence and Spirit. While I think this might be a fruitful way of understanding where the author is coming from, I’m afraid it won’t provide us with that much helpful information as how we should read Intelligence and Spirit. Obviously, Negarestani has an exceptional intellectual talent. The flaws of Cyclonopedia as he has mentioned in his interviews are mostly due to the fact that English is not his first language and he wrote that novel almost fifteen years ago. Since then, Negarestani has proved himself to be skillful at mastering a language. He can write an experimental text with the same ease as he can write a lucid philosophical text. But this review is not about Negarestani, it is about a work of philosophy.
What is the meaning of the human not as a species but as a historical idea? The book begins with a problem so simple and yet so unexplored: How can we talk about ourselves in the face of an impending artificial general intelligence (AGI), and how can we talk about AGI as in contrast to the human as a historical idea? The answer is simple but its ramifications are quite tangled and intricate. Negarestani's basic argument briefly goes as follows: (a) the human is a historical idea receptive to change and repair. It does not signify an essence or a species being (like homo sapience) even though every idea is constrained by historical understandings of nature such as physics, biology, genetics and neuroscience which are themselves prone to revision. (b) we tend to confound the present moment with the entirety of our history. We mistake the current manifestation of the idea of the human with the idea of the human as such. (c) This mistake which originates from our lack of historical self-conscious leads us to see the future potentialities of the idea of human (which can be instantiated by an AGI) as threats or disconnections to our history. (d) But all such fabulations share one common denominator: they see the human as fixed and therefore, the thought of an artificial general intelligence comes off as either a threat to the fixity of the human or completely disconnected with it. (e) Once we reclaim the human as a historical idea which can be revised, then there is no need to see AGI as either a threat or a messiah. Our attitudes towards AI are informed by the historical attitudes we have with regard to the idea of the human itself. If we take the idea of the human as a historical idea the totality of which is not given, then AI or AGI won’t signify threats, dangers or a benign singularity god. AI/AGI become the prostheses of a historical idea which is the human.
These are the premises upon which Intelligence and Spirit is built. But like all great books, Intelligence and Spirit is not limited to answering these question or fleshing out the consequences of such premises. It does much more. If you want to read this book, then you should read it in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education, Kant’s take on Rousseau and the German Idealist notion of Bildung. But this time through the lens of American pragmatism, computer science, neuroscience and formal learning.
What is the meaning of the human not as a species but as a historical idea? The book begins with a problem so simple and yet so unexplored: How can we talk about ourselves in the face of an impending artificial general intelligence (AGI), and how can we talk about AGI as in contrast to the human as a historical idea? The answer is simple but its ramifications are quite tangled and intricate. Negarestani's basic argument briefly goes as follows: (a) the human is a historical idea receptive to change and repair. It does not signify an essence or a species being (like homo sapience) even though every idea is constrained by historical understandings of nature such as physics, biology, genetics and neuroscience which are themselves prone to revision. (b) we tend to confound the present moment with the entirety of our history. We mistake the current manifestation of the idea of the human with the idea of the human as such. (c) This mistake which originates from our lack of historical self-conscious leads us to see the future potentialities of the idea of human (which can be instantiated by an AGI) as threats or disconnections to our history. (d) But all such fabulations share one common denominator: they see the human as fixed and therefore, the thought of an artificial general intelligence comes off as either a threat to the fixity of the human or completely disconnected with it. (e) Once we reclaim the human as a historical idea which can be revised, then there is no need to see AGI as either a threat or a messiah. Our attitudes towards AI are informed by the historical attitudes we have with regard to the idea of the human itself. If we take the idea of the human as a historical idea the totality of which is not given, then AI or AGI won’t signify threats, dangers or a benign singularity god. AI/AGI become the prostheses of a historical idea which is the human.
These are the premises upon which Intelligence and Spirit is built. But like all great books, Intelligence and Spirit is not limited to answering these question or fleshing out the consequences of such premises. It does much more. If you want to read this book, then you should read it in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education, Kant’s take on Rousseau and the German Idealist notion of Bildung. But this time through the lens of American pragmatism, computer science, neuroscience and formal learning.
April 16, 2021
Since the reviewer named Paul here has the habit of deleting responses to his one-star review to make sure his uninformed self-congratulatory approach to philosophy remains unchallenged, I am incorporating my response to him in my brief review of I&S.
I agree with Alex Obrigewitsch’ review that this work is really not about AGI in any substantial way. Negrestani is explicit about it in the first chapter. He wants to talk about AGI as an oblique way to talk about the human and the conditions of possibility of personhood in the vein of German Idealism and the idea of bildung which is the main motif of chapters 3-7. As he frequently mentions, he is not interested in AGI pe se, but only AGI as an outside view of looking at and renegotiating what makes the human human, the apperceptive agent, the subject of cognition. AGI for him is a makeshift perspective to make sense of what we take to be the human/sapiens. What he means by the outside view is something like this: inhabiting a given range of transcendental structures commits one to think and act from the limited or unexamined resource of those transcendental resources like language, social relations etc which are firmly entrenched in one's broad views of oneself and the world.
I don’t see how this book is sci-fi or a version of lesswrong’s love with AI. The choice of AGI as a topic is specifically a methodological and critical one in this book. It is designed to address the problem of intelligence as a question that requires qualifications. Go wrong with such necessary qualifications about the realization of AGI which are in reality questions about how we understand the sapient agency, and soon you find yourself in some questionable metaphysical funny farm. Negarestani for the most part follows the protocols to stay away from unwarranted speculative thoughts about such issues. He often issues warnings about the objectives of the book: It is not about AGI but AGI as a sandbox model for exploring the concept of the human and the agency. That said, I really have no idea about these reviewers who think this is work about AGI in the vein of sci-fi or lesswrong’s unconditional AI culture. From the get-go, this book distances itself from over-optimistic and pessimistic approaches to AGI. Any talk about AGI without qualification is not an actual critical thought. This is the starting premise of this book. As we soon learn, AGI means something fundamentally different: ‘A’ stands for the level of abstraction (of the artifact) at which we call something intelligent, from problem-solving levels of intelligence to conditions required for something like an experiencing apperceptive agent. ‘G’ stands for the level of generality as in what is the level and type of generality by which we approach the question of intelligence. I&S spends a great deal talking about the qualitative levels of generalization of intelligence by underlining different sets of constraints across various criteria. Finally, ‘I’ stands for intelligence. Considering that the concept of intelligence has no concrete sense without such qualifications, what do we actually mean by intelligence when we use the term, what are the consequences of having something identified as intelligence? When we call something intelligent in the above sense, what are the implications of that? These are the question I&S attempt to answer particularly in the first chapter, the second chapter, and the last one.
The last point, the said reviewer has not made any substantial point about why this book is so awful, he just expresses his vague dissatisfaction with Negerestani and the book being a work of sci-fi. He thinks of Sellars as someone who has misread Kant and Hegel. His only line of reasoning is via an appeal to authority and by that, I mean figures who have zero intellectual influence in the making of the history of philosophy other than in a very parochial cult-like Heideggerian circle to which the said reviewer evidently belongs.
To finish this review on a hilarious note, let's look at this reviewr's way of challenging critic: "So I'll try to take you seriously here -- do you have any training in continental philosophy, or philosophy generally? Can you tell me on the basis of your systematic reading of Kant, Hegel, et al. (preferably in an academic context where you were taught and guided by actual scholars) precisely why I'm wrong about Negarestani's interpretation of these figures? Seriously, can you give me a list of the books you've read by Kant and about Kant (in the original languages if possible), and who you studied with? Have you passed doctoral comps on any of these figures or taught them to others? And as for Negarestani on AGI, have you read Dreyfus, Hart, et al., on critiques of AGI, or Kelly et al. on the irreducibility of mind? "
What sort of self-serving PhD philosophy dweeb makes such questions? What is the point of doing philosophy if you have your scholarly references all in order? This is a sad example of those people who get a PhD in philosophy and become bitter over time as they realize no one actually gives a two-cent about their degree or lack of imagination. Sour losers will always be sour about everything.
I agree with Alex Obrigewitsch’ review that this work is really not about AGI in any substantial way. Negrestani is explicit about it in the first chapter. He wants to talk about AGI as an oblique way to talk about the human and the conditions of possibility of personhood in the vein of German Idealism and the idea of bildung which is the main motif of chapters 3-7. As he frequently mentions, he is not interested in AGI pe se, but only AGI as an outside view of looking at and renegotiating what makes the human human, the apperceptive agent, the subject of cognition. AGI for him is a makeshift perspective to make sense of what we take to be the human/sapiens. What he means by the outside view is something like this: inhabiting a given range of transcendental structures commits one to think and act from the limited or unexamined resource of those transcendental resources like language, social relations etc which are firmly entrenched in one's broad views of oneself and the world.
I don’t see how this book is sci-fi or a version of lesswrong’s love with AI. The choice of AGI as a topic is specifically a methodological and critical one in this book. It is designed to address the problem of intelligence as a question that requires qualifications. Go wrong with such necessary qualifications about the realization of AGI which are in reality questions about how we understand the sapient agency, and soon you find yourself in some questionable metaphysical funny farm. Negarestani for the most part follows the protocols to stay away from unwarranted speculative thoughts about such issues. He often issues warnings about the objectives of the book: It is not about AGI but AGI as a sandbox model for exploring the concept of the human and the agency. That said, I really have no idea about these reviewers who think this is work about AGI in the vein of sci-fi or lesswrong’s unconditional AI culture. From the get-go, this book distances itself from over-optimistic and pessimistic approaches to AGI. Any talk about AGI without qualification is not an actual critical thought. This is the starting premise of this book. As we soon learn, AGI means something fundamentally different: ‘A’ stands for the level of abstraction (of the artifact) at which we call something intelligent, from problem-solving levels of intelligence to conditions required for something like an experiencing apperceptive agent. ‘G’ stands for the level of generality as in what is the level and type of generality by which we approach the question of intelligence. I&S spends a great deal talking about the qualitative levels of generalization of intelligence by underlining different sets of constraints across various criteria. Finally, ‘I’ stands for intelligence. Considering that the concept of intelligence has no concrete sense without such qualifications, what do we actually mean by intelligence when we use the term, what are the consequences of having something identified as intelligence? When we call something intelligent in the above sense, what are the implications of that? These are the question I&S attempt to answer particularly in the first chapter, the second chapter, and the last one.
The last point, the said reviewer has not made any substantial point about why this book is so awful, he just expresses his vague dissatisfaction with Negerestani and the book being a work of sci-fi. He thinks of Sellars as someone who has misread Kant and Hegel. His only line of reasoning is via an appeal to authority and by that, I mean figures who have zero intellectual influence in the making of the history of philosophy other than in a very parochial cult-like Heideggerian circle to which the said reviewer evidently belongs.
To finish this review on a hilarious note, let's look at this reviewr's way of challenging critic: "So I'll try to take you seriously here -- do you have any training in continental philosophy, or philosophy generally? Can you tell me on the basis of your systematic reading of Kant, Hegel, et al. (preferably in an academic context where you were taught and guided by actual scholars) precisely why I'm wrong about Negarestani's interpretation of these figures? Seriously, can you give me a list of the books you've read by Kant and about Kant (in the original languages if possible), and who you studied with? Have you passed doctoral comps on any of these figures or taught them to others? And as for Negarestani on AGI, have you read Dreyfus, Hart, et al., on critiques of AGI, or Kelly et al. on the irreducibility of mind? "
What sort of self-serving PhD philosophy dweeb makes such questions? What is the point of doing philosophy if you have your scholarly references all in order? This is a sad example of those people who get a PhD in philosophy and become bitter over time as they realize no one actually gives a two-cent about their degree or lack of imagination. Sour losers will always be sour about everything.
August 29, 2019
This book was recommended to me by a friend who is a philosopher and computer scientist. At first, I was pessimistic. Both the description and the blurbs were off-putting. But now having read a good portion of this book, I’m convinced this is stepping stone for building a future philosophy. A masterwork of synthetic philosophy that does not shy away from launching devastating polemics against posthumanism (e.g. David Roden), new materialism, singularitarianism (e.g. Bostrom and Nick Land) and old humanism, while retaining the possibility and the mandate of constructing artificial general intelligence as the apex of self-conception and self-transformation. I suspect Negarestani’s work won’t garner any significant attention from the philosophical and AI communities anytime soon. Nevertheless, it is bound to change the scene in the years to come.
November 22, 2020
This was a very interesting and thought provoking book that spanned an interesting range of subjects I almost did not expect someone would ever bring together. At the core, the book is about intelligence, what one could define it as, and how we can endeavor to study it, and additionally how this study is an integral part of intelligence itself. Moreover, there is a central theme of questions around the nature of AIG (Artificial General Intelligence), and a case made that its development leans on both the analytical mathematical development of systems, logics, and formal languages, as well as the "transcendental psychology" of the subject that can be developed out of German Idealism. It was fascinating to see how German Idealism and abstract (theory B) computer science were brought together with a wealth of very relevant and interesting references. I was also very glad to see how the notion of recursion was made so central as a common leitmotif among these disparate intellectual areas. Perhaps the simplest formulation of this recursion is in the notion of Intelligence itself, which Negarestani shows in many ways to be what it does in its self-development, self-expansion, and self-understanding. Generally this was a great book and I look forward to making passes through it again to drill down more on specific arguments and issues.
That being said, there were some aspect of this book of which I couldn't help but find myself critical, in spite of how generally good it was. Firstly, and foremost for me specifically - being that I have a great familiarity with the work of Freud - I was a bit surprised by the complete lack of reference to anything from psychoanalysis; this omission struck me as almost pathological, but that could just be coming from me. I am not sure if Negarestani is familiar with Freud, Lacan, or the vast plethora of ways these thinkers are explored throughout postmodern thought, but if he had any substantial exposure to it, it would almost be remiss not to engage the ideas regarding the mind and language arising out of Freud, Sausser, or their fusion in Lacan. Even if he wanted to dodge Lacan and structuralism, there is so much in Freud that I would argue pursues seriously the project he lays out for interrogating intelligence. Freud constructs toy models, speculates about the structure of consciousness and memory, and deduces mechanisms of language in thought. I would urge him - or anyone interested in this subject - to check out *The Unconscious*, the third part of *Interpretation of Dreams*, and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* at the least. It is as though Negarestani has dodged the whole legacy following Freud; almost anyone who mentions Freud seems curtailed from the discussion. I am not sure whether this is a matter of keeping things in scope, or tipping his hat to the Analytic philosophical tradition that refuses outright to engage with Freud for reasons that seem to be some kind of puritanical dedication to extricate thought, science, reason, and the mind from any trace of sexuality. Again, some of this might be my own bias.
Aside from the lack of psychoanalysis, there are some more general criticisms I had about the book. The writing style, while precise and detailed, sometimes drifted into the territory of tedious or overwrought. There were some passages that reminded me of the most obnoxious moments of Nietzsche's writing, equally pseudo-poetic and pseudo-polemic, as well as others that reminded me of the most obnoxious moments of Foucault's writing in which minor details and asides are troweled onto the discussion until the trail of the central thesis being explored is lost in the weeds.
Also, coming from a background of theoretical computer science, while I was thrilled to see how the recondite topography of obscurities I spent my graduate carrier studying could be brought into a vibrant philosophical discourse, I could not help but find Negarestani's expositions of these ideas to be messy and fragmented, at times anally pursuing pro forma details that hardly contributed to the value the ideas generally offered to the territory. It was as though he sought to show how far one could get in his shiny red race car only to get lost itemizing a loose selection of parts in the engine he thought were neat. I would really like to see work like this facilitate more interdisciplinarity in discourse particularly across the rift between the world of theory and the kingdom of STEM that had only become a greater chasm after the "Science Wars", but I would have some concern that Negarestani's attempt to tool around with the formal and mathematical structures of some of the ideas he has brought forward might put off those from the science as being incomplete, inaccurate, or shallow, as well as those from theory and philosophy as piecemeal, ambiguous, obscurantist, and even Kabbalistic. I would imagine the text would hit this intersection harder if some of the loose formula-play was reeled back and more effort was placed on the intuition of these systems (linear logic, Chu Spaces, Category Theory, game semantics, ...) and their ramifications, leaving their formal exposition to references which practice their formal due diligence at the expense of devoting tens of pages to their definitions (let alone hundreds of pages used to demonstrate their theoretical elaborations and applications).
Notwithstanding these criticisms, I think this book develops a vibrant discourse around a tremendously important subject that is both enduring in the form of philosophy itself and topical to our present ambitions to understand what we are doing in developing AI. In the end, Negarestani makes what could almost be called an ethical case for pursuing AI; that AI is a consequence of what intelligence is to begin with. In some ways, the last chapter, and its final proclamations may be the most controversial part of a book, but it definitely sets the stage for a more sophisticated debate around the subject, which in the space of public intellectual discourse today seems mired (to put it crudely) either in libertarian big-boy gamer utopian fap fantasy or speculative sci-fi anime adjacent doomer dread.
That being said, there were some aspect of this book of which I couldn't help but find myself critical, in spite of how generally good it was. Firstly, and foremost for me specifically - being that I have a great familiarity with the work of Freud - I was a bit surprised by the complete lack of reference to anything from psychoanalysis; this omission struck me as almost pathological, but that could just be coming from me. I am not sure if Negarestani is familiar with Freud, Lacan, or the vast plethora of ways these thinkers are explored throughout postmodern thought, but if he had any substantial exposure to it, it would almost be remiss not to engage the ideas regarding the mind and language arising out of Freud, Sausser, or their fusion in Lacan. Even if he wanted to dodge Lacan and structuralism, there is so much in Freud that I would argue pursues seriously the project he lays out for interrogating intelligence. Freud constructs toy models, speculates about the structure of consciousness and memory, and deduces mechanisms of language in thought. I would urge him - or anyone interested in this subject - to check out *The Unconscious*, the third part of *Interpretation of Dreams*, and *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* at the least. It is as though Negarestani has dodged the whole legacy following Freud; almost anyone who mentions Freud seems curtailed from the discussion. I am not sure whether this is a matter of keeping things in scope, or tipping his hat to the Analytic philosophical tradition that refuses outright to engage with Freud for reasons that seem to be some kind of puritanical dedication to extricate thought, science, reason, and the mind from any trace of sexuality. Again, some of this might be my own bias.
Aside from the lack of psychoanalysis, there are some more general criticisms I had about the book. The writing style, while precise and detailed, sometimes drifted into the territory of tedious or overwrought. There were some passages that reminded me of the most obnoxious moments of Nietzsche's writing, equally pseudo-poetic and pseudo-polemic, as well as others that reminded me of the most obnoxious moments of Foucault's writing in which minor details and asides are troweled onto the discussion until the trail of the central thesis being explored is lost in the weeds.
Also, coming from a background of theoretical computer science, while I was thrilled to see how the recondite topography of obscurities I spent my graduate carrier studying could be brought into a vibrant philosophical discourse, I could not help but find Negarestani's expositions of these ideas to be messy and fragmented, at times anally pursuing pro forma details that hardly contributed to the value the ideas generally offered to the territory. It was as though he sought to show how far one could get in his shiny red race car only to get lost itemizing a loose selection of parts in the engine he thought were neat. I would really like to see work like this facilitate more interdisciplinarity in discourse particularly across the rift between the world of theory and the kingdom of STEM that had only become a greater chasm after the "Science Wars", but I would have some concern that Negarestani's attempt to tool around with the formal and mathematical structures of some of the ideas he has brought forward might put off those from the science as being incomplete, inaccurate, or shallow, as well as those from theory and philosophy as piecemeal, ambiguous, obscurantist, and even Kabbalistic. I would imagine the text would hit this intersection harder if some of the loose formula-play was reeled back and more effort was placed on the intuition of these systems (linear logic, Chu Spaces, Category Theory, game semantics, ...) and their ramifications, leaving their formal exposition to references which practice their formal due diligence at the expense of devoting tens of pages to their definitions (let alone hundreds of pages used to demonstrate their theoretical elaborations and applications).
Notwithstanding these criticisms, I think this book develops a vibrant discourse around a tremendously important subject that is both enduring in the form of philosophy itself and topical to our present ambitions to understand what we are doing in developing AI. In the end, Negarestani makes what could almost be called an ethical case for pursuing AI; that AI is a consequence of what intelligence is to begin with. In some ways, the last chapter, and its final proclamations may be the most controversial part of a book, but it definitely sets the stage for a more sophisticated debate around the subject, which in the space of public intellectual discourse today seems mired (to put it crudely) either in libertarian big-boy gamer utopian fap fantasy or speculative sci-fi anime adjacent doomer dread.
April 1, 2019
First of all, anyone expecting this beast to be a sequel to Cyclonopedia will be totally disappointed. This is a purely philosophical work, systematically fusing analytical and continental philosophy, theoretical computer science and complexity theory, ethics of artificial intelligence (AGI) and ethics of human self-discovery (Geist). Extremely detailed and at times technical, the sheer scope of this book is almost breathtaking and intimidating. I will write a more engaged review after rereading some of the more technical chapters on Boltzmann and formal induction.
January 24, 2023
It's hard to know where to begin . . . this guy is not even wrong; I was reminded of Bostrom and Yudkowsky, and not in a good way.
I'm going to put this as frankly as possible -- Negarestani is a delusional dilettante, and I&S is bad science fiction masquerading as philosophy. I was zero percent surprised to find out that he had collaborated on a "cosmological comic book about cinema and pulp literature" and co-edited a terrible book on "the cosmic dimensions of cookery." (Say what you will about Žižek and Deleuze, but at least they did the reading.)
Even using the word 'philosophy' for what Negarestani is doing seems wrong somehow; the positions that he attributes to Kant and Hegel are fanciful at best, and he seems to think of the topic as consisting of a freshman-level understanding of German Idealism + a handful of analytic philosophers.
The way you can tell that actual philosophers don't take this guy seriously is that I hadn't heard of him until last week; I guess he's managed to impress people at the academy-adjacent lunatic fringe of continental philosophy, and then a bunch of self-educated 'rationalists' on GR and elsewhere?
(Also, ffs, AGI is a category mistake -- I guess I'll just keep saying this in every review I write about this fundamental confusion of concepts that takes itself to be a field of study.)
* * *
So I ended up going back to take a closer look (in order to properly respond in a comment thread); chapter 1 is reasonable, but his reading of Hegel/Kant is, as I said, freshman-level stuff; esp. for Hegel, taking the most famous English-language interpreters (Harris, Pippin) and then summarizing, in a simplistic way, propositions from the Science of Logic, Phenomenology, etc. These aren't "wrong" interpretations exactly, but they're simplistic. The problem starts when he pivots to AGI; Negarestani states (on p. 40) that "AGI is to be regarded neither as technoscientific hysteria nor as intellectual hubris; it is an expression of our arrival at a new phase of critical self-consciousness." Let me be as clear as possible; AGI is, in fact, technoscientific hysteria and intellectual hubris (to say the least).
Anyway, Chapter 2 is where I gave up initially (p. 100 or so) -- I realized that the rest of the book would be awkwardly trying to map transcendental psychology onto AGI, but AGI is science fiction, and there's nothing of use here. He writes, "What makes Hegel’s picture of geist a significant contribution not only to the history of functionalism and philosophy of mind but also, intriguingly, to the history of artificial general intelligence, is that it presents a social model of general intelligence, one in which sociality is a formal condition for the realization of cognitive abilities that would be unrealizable by individual agents alone."
This is quite literally science fiction, and not a particularly interesting take on the topic; Greg Egan got there 40 years ago in his book Diaspora (on the role of socialization in the development of AGI). Negarestani adds a shit-ton of jargon to a 1980s sci-fi novel -- a novel that actually has far more philosophical depth than Intelligence and Spirit -- and that's it. You don't need Kant or Hegel, or even a simplified version of them, to write science fiction about AGI; even the idea of how a 'child AGI' would learn has already been covered by a dozen SF writers.
It's not impossible to use something entirely fictional, such as AGI, to arrive at interesting conclusions; AGI can be a thought-experiment to think about consciousness, intersubjectivity, etc., more deeply. This has been done within SF quite a bit, as stated above. Many philosophers have written very interesting books on these topics (intersubjectivity, etc., without using AGI as such); Robert Pippin is amazing, for example. Negarestani is just not comparable to any of these people, as far as I can tell. And I get it, he's not trying to write a 'Hegelian book', but then it seems as if he's just mentioning Kant/Hegel and a few articles by Sellars or Boltzmann as justification/ballast for his insane voyage into AGI thought experiments; it's pretentious.
He has not delved deeply enough into any of the actual positions of Kant/Hegel to really 'reconcile' any positions beyond a simplistic analytic-philosophy version of Kant/Hegel -- he uses Kant/Hegel as a token of a simplistic position about the 'thickness' of rationality (among other things). I mentioned undergrad-level understanding because his citations remind me, quite literally, of a bright undergraduate; citing random passages from massive systematic works out of context, barely scratching the surface in terms of secondary literature, and writing jargon-filled run-on sentences. It sounds trivial but it really isn't -- look at the footnotes/endnotes of actual scholars and then look at Negarestani's. He appears to be working with, like, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and citing articles mentioned there? Look at any of Pippin's writings, or Taylor's, or even Derrida's pre-Glas writings on Hegel and tell me that Negarestani is anywhere vaguely close to being as knowledgeable or as profound of a reader of German Idealism. If you read Henrich, Velkley, Allison, Heidegger, et al., on Kant, then it's immediately obvious how impoverished Negarestani's understanding is.
I also was not a fan of the general second-hand Deleuzean anti-capitalist bullshit that Negarestani mentions randomly on various pages (e.g., "On the descriptive level, capitalist society will be regarded as a metaphysical totality in which every element is by definition ontologically subsumed within capitalism. Even concepts and conceptual activities in general will be deemed to be subsumed by its mode of production"), and also in the conclusion, which is naive utopianism . . . but ffs, where he writes things like "cosmological politics should be taken as a new paradigm for the politics of the Left, one in which positive deindividualization or the labour of collectivization is not just about intersubjectivity" . . . this has nothing to do with AGI or his other arguments, it's like he half-remembered that Deleuze keeps bringing up capitalism in the middle of his arguments, and so why not mention it here for no reason.
Basically, my bullshit detector was just off the charts with Negarestani, and given that he has never been mentioned by any of the most interesting/prominent writers on intersubjectivity, German Idealism, etc., it would appear that they agree with me. The importance of a thinker can (usually) be deduced by how safely he can be ignored. But even if Negarestani were world-famous, my opinion wouldn't change -- Judith Butler is also 'not even wrong' (imo) despite her fame, etc.
With all that said, if you're into AGI thought experiments, I guess the book is not terrible? I'm constitutionally allergic to Rationalist/AI blathering about AGI, and also to Deleuzeans (though not Deleuze himself). It's entirely possible that he's actually making a not-terrible argument within the tiny academic niche of post-Sellars theory -- I'll never know because I have no desire to master the fine details of this world, because their premises/foundations are superficial and incoherent.
I'm going to put this as frankly as possible -- Negarestani is a delusional dilettante, and I&S is bad science fiction masquerading as philosophy. I was zero percent surprised to find out that he had collaborated on a "cosmological comic book about cinema and pulp literature" and co-edited a terrible book on "the cosmic dimensions of cookery." (Say what you will about Žižek and Deleuze, but at least they did the reading.)
Even using the word 'philosophy' for what Negarestani is doing seems wrong somehow; the positions that he attributes to Kant and Hegel are fanciful at best, and he seems to think of the topic as consisting of a freshman-level understanding of German Idealism + a handful of analytic philosophers.
The way you can tell that actual philosophers don't take this guy seriously is that I hadn't heard of him until last week; I guess he's managed to impress people at the academy-adjacent lunatic fringe of continental philosophy, and then a bunch of self-educated 'rationalists' on GR and elsewhere?
(Also, ffs, AGI is a category mistake -- I guess I'll just keep saying this in every review I write about this fundamental confusion of concepts that takes itself to be a field of study.)
* * *
So I ended up going back to take a closer look (in order to properly respond in a comment thread); chapter 1 is reasonable, but his reading of Hegel/Kant is, as I said, freshman-level stuff; esp. for Hegel, taking the most famous English-language interpreters (Harris, Pippin) and then summarizing, in a simplistic way, propositions from the Science of Logic, Phenomenology, etc. These aren't "wrong" interpretations exactly, but they're simplistic. The problem starts when he pivots to AGI; Negarestani states (on p. 40) that "AGI is to be regarded neither as technoscientific hysteria nor as intellectual hubris; it is an expression of our arrival at a new phase of critical self-consciousness." Let me be as clear as possible; AGI is, in fact, technoscientific hysteria and intellectual hubris (to say the least).
Anyway, Chapter 2 is where I gave up initially (p. 100 or so) -- I realized that the rest of the book would be awkwardly trying to map transcendental psychology onto AGI, but AGI is science fiction, and there's nothing of use here. He writes, "What makes Hegel’s picture of geist a significant contribution not only to the history of functionalism and philosophy of mind but also, intriguingly, to the history of artificial general intelligence, is that it presents a social model of general intelligence, one in which sociality is a formal condition for the realization of cognitive abilities that would be unrealizable by individual agents alone."
This is quite literally science fiction, and not a particularly interesting take on the topic; Greg Egan got there 40 years ago in his book Diaspora (on the role of socialization in the development of AGI). Negarestani adds a shit-ton of jargon to a 1980s sci-fi novel -- a novel that actually has far more philosophical depth than Intelligence and Spirit -- and that's it. You don't need Kant or Hegel, or even a simplified version of them, to write science fiction about AGI; even the idea of how a 'child AGI' would learn has already been covered by a dozen SF writers.
It's not impossible to use something entirely fictional, such as AGI, to arrive at interesting conclusions; AGI can be a thought-experiment to think about consciousness, intersubjectivity, etc., more deeply. This has been done within SF quite a bit, as stated above. Many philosophers have written very interesting books on these topics (intersubjectivity, etc., without using AGI as such); Robert Pippin is amazing, for example. Negarestani is just not comparable to any of these people, as far as I can tell. And I get it, he's not trying to write a 'Hegelian book', but then it seems as if he's just mentioning Kant/Hegel and a few articles by Sellars or Boltzmann as justification/ballast for his insane voyage into AGI thought experiments; it's pretentious.
He has not delved deeply enough into any of the actual positions of Kant/Hegel to really 'reconcile' any positions beyond a simplistic analytic-philosophy version of Kant/Hegel -- he uses Kant/Hegel as a token of a simplistic position about the 'thickness' of rationality (among other things). I mentioned undergrad-level understanding because his citations remind me, quite literally, of a bright undergraduate; citing random passages from massive systematic works out of context, barely scratching the surface in terms of secondary literature, and writing jargon-filled run-on sentences. It sounds trivial but it really isn't -- look at the footnotes/endnotes of actual scholars and then look at Negarestani's. He appears to be working with, like, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and citing articles mentioned there? Look at any of Pippin's writings, or Taylor's, or even Derrida's pre-Glas writings on Hegel and tell me that Negarestani is anywhere vaguely close to being as knowledgeable or as profound of a reader of German Idealism. If you read Henrich, Velkley, Allison, Heidegger, et al., on Kant, then it's immediately obvious how impoverished Negarestani's understanding is.
I also was not a fan of the general second-hand Deleuzean anti-capitalist bullshit that Negarestani mentions randomly on various pages (e.g., "On the descriptive level, capitalist society will be regarded as a metaphysical totality in which every element is by definition ontologically subsumed within capitalism. Even concepts and conceptual activities in general will be deemed to be subsumed by its mode of production"), and also in the conclusion, which is naive utopianism . . . but ffs, where he writes things like "cosmological politics should be taken as a new paradigm for the politics of the Left, one in which positive deindividualization or the labour of collectivization is not just about intersubjectivity" . . . this has nothing to do with AGI or his other arguments, it's like he half-remembered that Deleuze keeps bringing up capitalism in the middle of his arguments, and so why not mention it here for no reason.
Basically, my bullshit detector was just off the charts with Negarestani, and given that he has never been mentioned by any of the most interesting/prominent writers on intersubjectivity, German Idealism, etc., it would appear that they agree with me. The importance of a thinker can (usually) be deduced by how safely he can be ignored. But even if Negarestani were world-famous, my opinion wouldn't change -- Judith Butler is also 'not even wrong' (imo) despite her fame, etc.
With all that said, if you're into AGI thought experiments, I guess the book is not terrible? I'm constitutionally allergic to Rationalist/AI blathering about AGI, and also to Deleuzeans (though not Deleuze himself). It's entirely possible that he's actually making a not-terrible argument within the tiny academic niche of post-Sellars theory -- I'll never know because I have no desire to master the fine details of this world, because their premises/foundations are superficial and incoherent.
May 9, 2019
What an achievement. This is a book that holds nothing back when it comes to the defense of philosophy as the science of the human. We have not even touched the surface of what it means to be a human.
November 21, 2025
This is one philosophy book that has been sitting on my backlog for ages. So, you want to talk about AGI without looking like an absolute buffoon? This is one of the books you must read.
Intelligence and Spirit is an ambitiously synthetic work that offers a kind of "Systemic program of German Idealism", albeit one retrofitted with inferentialist and computational-interactionist armaments to tackle the burning question of the AGI movement. This question is simple but revolutionary in scope and function: what are the invariant and formal transcendental structures necessary for mindedness, thinking, and intelligence? The thought-movement that identifies the latter as realizabilities (or abilities) that can in principle be unmoored from their contingent realizers in the past, present and future turns out to be one and the same movement in which intelligence then comes to grasp itself as an impersonal view from no-where and no-when. Intelligence crafts its own history (the realm of logos) by making use of nature (phusis) over whose magnificent rotting corpse it hovers. The chapters are somewhat uneven in in terms of quality and accessibility. If you have some background in Kant and Hegel, and some grasp of the basic fault-lines in posthumanist and accelerationist discourse you can probably cruise through Chapter 1. Chapters 3, 5 and 6 contains step by step deduction of the necessary conditions of possibility of mind in the form of a primitive toy model with sensory-motor capabilities, who by virtue of its "wiring" can track patterns in nature and who eventually acquires the capacity to represent itself as an pure and empty "I" to which representations can be attached. For me, personally, these Kant-Sellars-inspired chapters represent the peak of the intellectual adventure simulated in and by this text. The claims advanced in these chapters added fuel to my suspicion that robust embodiment is a necessary condition of possibility of AGI. For us finite beings, intelligence takes time because of numerous multi-modal processes of syntheses (sketched out by Kant and explicated and exploded by post-Kantians). But for intelligence, we, what came before us, and what will come after us, are nothing but a pre-history. In addition, Chapter 6 makes a pretty convincing case that symbols, or language proper allows us to track patterns-governed regularities in nature not by picturing the items in the natural order (as ideograms and sign-designs wont to do) but by referring to other symbols. However, all hell broke loose in Chapter 7. I found myself progressively unable to keep up with the technical details of the argument. How does interaction games played concurrently in real time among agents cause semantics to emerge natively ('immanently') from syntax? Negarestani outlines a plausible mechanics by which this could come about. But his explication flew over my head.
It goes without saying that, it being a work in the tradition of transcendental philosophy, Intelligence and Spirit unabashedly displays its Kantian and Hegelian lineages. However, the Kantian trajectory is more fleshed out compared to the Hegelian one. After Chapter 1, we do not revisit Hegel until the last chapter. In Chapter 8, Negarestani recruits Plato, his transcendentals--the good, the beautiful and the just and the thesis of the dividing line in his crusade against modern day sophists, superintelligence mongers and vitalists-alike. Negarestani is squarely on the side of Team Disenchantment (aka the right side of history).
The weakest part of the book is Negarestani's continual affirmation of the distinction between that which is merely formal (thinking) and that which is substantive (being) which he in part attributes to Plato, among others. I wish he had devoted at least a subsection to defending this critical distinction.
(The book subtly engages with the thought of Nick Land, the enfant terrible of accelerationism. He is cited but not named directly).
Intelligence and Spirit is an ambitiously synthetic work that offers a kind of "Systemic program of German Idealism", albeit one retrofitted with inferentialist and computational-interactionist armaments to tackle the burning question of the AGI movement. This question is simple but revolutionary in scope and function: what are the invariant and formal transcendental structures necessary for mindedness, thinking, and intelligence? The thought-movement that identifies the latter as realizabilities (or abilities) that can in principle be unmoored from their contingent realizers in the past, present and future turns out to be one and the same movement in which intelligence then comes to grasp itself as an impersonal view from no-where and no-when. Intelligence crafts its own history (the realm of logos) by making use of nature (phusis) over whose magnificent rotting corpse it hovers. The chapters are somewhat uneven in in terms of quality and accessibility. If you have some background in Kant and Hegel, and some grasp of the basic fault-lines in posthumanist and accelerationist discourse you can probably cruise through Chapter 1. Chapters 3, 5 and 6 contains step by step deduction of the necessary conditions of possibility of mind in the form of a primitive toy model with sensory-motor capabilities, who by virtue of its "wiring" can track patterns in nature and who eventually acquires the capacity to represent itself as an pure and empty "I" to which representations can be attached. For me, personally, these Kant-Sellars-inspired chapters represent the peak of the intellectual adventure simulated in and by this text. The claims advanced in these chapters added fuel to my suspicion that robust embodiment is a necessary condition of possibility of AGI. For us finite beings, intelligence takes time because of numerous multi-modal processes of syntheses (sketched out by Kant and explicated and exploded by post-Kantians). But for intelligence, we, what came before us, and what will come after us, are nothing but a pre-history. In addition, Chapter 6 makes a pretty convincing case that symbols, or language proper allows us to track patterns-governed regularities in nature not by picturing the items in the natural order (as ideograms and sign-designs wont to do) but by referring to other symbols. However, all hell broke loose in Chapter 7. I found myself progressively unable to keep up with the technical details of the argument. How does interaction games played concurrently in real time among agents cause semantics to emerge natively ('immanently') from syntax? Negarestani outlines a plausible mechanics by which this could come about. But his explication flew over my head.
It goes without saying that, it being a work in the tradition of transcendental philosophy, Intelligence and Spirit unabashedly displays its Kantian and Hegelian lineages. However, the Kantian trajectory is more fleshed out compared to the Hegelian one. After Chapter 1, we do not revisit Hegel until the last chapter. In Chapter 8, Negarestani recruits Plato, his transcendentals--the good, the beautiful and the just and the thesis of the dividing line in his crusade against modern day sophists, superintelligence mongers and vitalists-alike. Negarestani is squarely on the side of Team Disenchantment (aka the right side of history).
The weakest part of the book is Negarestani's continual affirmation of the distinction between that which is merely formal (thinking) and that which is substantive (being) which he in part attributes to Plato, among others. I wish he had devoted at least a subsection to defending this critical distinction.
(The book subtly engages with the thought of Nick Land, the enfant terrible of accelerationism. He is cited but not named directly).
November 10, 2018
Review for LARB tktktk
July 4, 2021
This book is a “philosophy of intelligence and an intelligence of philosophy” and proposes that “it is spirit that cultivates the union of intelligence and [the] intelligible, without which intelligence as formally [or currently] conceived is a mere phantasm.” (Ray Brassier) Reza takes both of what he calls “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI; while extracting any contemporary discourse of AI and simply treating the concept of AGI as, bluntly, thought that is continuously reconstructing itself)” and picking up the project of German Idealism, to advanced beyond a metaphysical reading of Hegel, or Kant, and proclaim that spirit cannot be any more socialized than it can be materialized.
Reza takes Hegel’s Geist (in the same sense that it is not a transcendental object, but a means of historically philosophizing) to a neorationalist and functionalist perspective (inspiration from the hierarchical grammar debates with Chomsky in the 70’s are for better or worse scattered across Reza’s project, apparently and especially in the last few chapters); meaning, in Hegel’s words - “‘[t]he history of spirit is its own deed; for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself—in this case as spirit—the object of its own consciousness, and to comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself.” Geist, for Reza, is a general intelligence in its own history. The self-consciousness of Geist, created by the structuring of the mind, is the vehicle of freedom, from what Reza calls a “nowhere and nowhen’; though with implications of a (cunningly, maybe even woundingly metaphysical) atemporal logic. There is a huge emphasis on interaction in semantics as a result of his functionalism.
Functionalism in a philosophical sense is the position that the state of a thing or object depends not on its own constitution, its construction as an Independent thing, but by its activity, it is defined by the functions it performs in the system to which it belongs. To get a quicker grasp on this, it may help to trace its lineage to Aristotle. Aristotle had a practically computational view of capabilities of the soul to structure experience, which makes intelligible the intelligibility of things. Thomas Aquinas held an altered view of Aristotle’s view of the soul in that it is “form following function”; more importantly that the form of a whole qua whole produces casual powers of the whole, as a conjunctive power. In modern translation, this is saying as systems develop in complexity, properties arise that are properties the whole system, but not of the parts of the system (even, and especially, immaterial systems).
Absolute knowledge as defined by Hegel is knowledge that has no object external to itself that mediates it, the way the natural world mediates (vermittlung) the empirical claims of science through what Hegel calls suspension (aufhebung/aufheben), usually translated as “sublate” when used in the Hegelian dialectic sense. Aufheben carries a transcendental meaning that there is not really a good translation for; it has been described as a teleological maybe, or a deconstructing and preservation of a concept. Think about how the sciences develop through time. Absolute knowledge, therefore, is the way the Absolute spirit continuously reconstructs itself through time and in modern life, the way its internal reflection of the social aspects of our life develops structurally on its own authority.
Interpreting these points to Reza’s theses, the social aspects of the mind are formed by its interaction with an objective historically conditioned technological environment. The mind is being externalized through technology in symbiosis, through a co-evolutionary process. Reza bathes in rationalism and follows Kant in holding that we can never access reality or “noumena” (things-in-themselves, although this concept doesn’t quite hold for Reza); our minds have always already processed it for us. We are via continuous automation eternalizing our mind’s capabilities to external technical systems, into technical what Reza calls technical artefacts. Intelligence is a dark force for Reza, and Nick Land absently presents his work in part of this project. The project of intelligence is to further this externalization of the mind into technical systems.
Reza asks for us to think of philosophy and technology in what he (and Hegel) calls a “geistig [mental] manifestation”. Not to treat these forms of intelligence as an unknowable force, but as a plane constructed recursively through reasoning, a plane on which selfhood and freedom can be enlightened. The rest of the book is an exegesis on the first chapter, and there is a lot more mathematics/logic, information theory, linguistics, and apparently Plato in the rest of it. Defined by his publisher, this project of this book can be succinct reduced to
“[t]he history of philosophy conceived as the elaboration of a program for artificial general intelligence; intelligence understood as the impersonal and collective evolution of a thought that constructs itself according to a view from nowhere and nowhen.”
Reza takes Hegel’s Geist (in the same sense that it is not a transcendental object, but a means of historically philosophizing) to a neorationalist and functionalist perspective (inspiration from the hierarchical grammar debates with Chomsky in the 70’s are for better or worse scattered across Reza’s project, apparently and especially in the last few chapters); meaning, in Hegel’s words - “‘[t]he history of spirit is its own deed; for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself—in this case as spirit—the object of its own consciousness, and to comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself.” Geist, for Reza, is a general intelligence in its own history. The self-consciousness of Geist, created by the structuring of the mind, is the vehicle of freedom, from what Reza calls a “nowhere and nowhen’; though with implications of a (cunningly, maybe even woundingly metaphysical) atemporal logic. There is a huge emphasis on interaction in semantics as a result of his functionalism.
Functionalism in a philosophical sense is the position that the state of a thing or object depends not on its own constitution, its construction as an Independent thing, but by its activity, it is defined by the functions it performs in the system to which it belongs. To get a quicker grasp on this, it may help to trace its lineage to Aristotle. Aristotle had a practically computational view of capabilities of the soul to structure experience, which makes intelligible the intelligibility of things. Thomas Aquinas held an altered view of Aristotle’s view of the soul in that it is “form following function”; more importantly that the form of a whole qua whole produces casual powers of the whole, as a conjunctive power. In modern translation, this is saying as systems develop in complexity, properties arise that are properties the whole system, but not of the parts of the system (even, and especially, immaterial systems).
Absolute knowledge as defined by Hegel is knowledge that has no object external to itself that mediates it, the way the natural world mediates (vermittlung) the empirical claims of science through what Hegel calls suspension (aufhebung/aufheben), usually translated as “sublate” when used in the Hegelian dialectic sense. Aufheben carries a transcendental meaning that there is not really a good translation for; it has been described as a teleological maybe, or a deconstructing and preservation of a concept. Think about how the sciences develop through time. Absolute knowledge, therefore, is the way the Absolute spirit continuously reconstructs itself through time and in modern life, the way its internal reflection of the social aspects of our life develops structurally on its own authority.
Interpreting these points to Reza’s theses, the social aspects of the mind are formed by its interaction with an objective historically conditioned technological environment. The mind is being externalized through technology in symbiosis, through a co-evolutionary process. Reza bathes in rationalism and follows Kant in holding that we can never access reality or “noumena” (things-in-themselves, although this concept doesn’t quite hold for Reza); our minds have always already processed it for us. We are via continuous automation eternalizing our mind’s capabilities to external technical systems, into technical what Reza calls technical artefacts. Intelligence is a dark force for Reza, and Nick Land absently presents his work in part of this project. The project of intelligence is to further this externalization of the mind into technical systems.
Reza asks for us to think of philosophy and technology in what he (and Hegel) calls a “geistig [mental] manifestation”. Not to treat these forms of intelligence as an unknowable force, but as a plane constructed recursively through reasoning, a plane on which selfhood and freedom can be enlightened. The rest of the book is an exegesis on the first chapter, and there is a lot more mathematics/logic, information theory, linguistics, and apparently Plato in the rest of it. Defined by his publisher, this project of this book can be succinct reduced to
“[t]he history of philosophy conceived as the elaboration of a program for artificial general intelligence; intelligence understood as the impersonal and collective evolution of a thought that constructs itself according to a view from nowhere and nowhen.”
June 20, 2023
A book that made me stop wanting to write reviews on Goodreads.
There's this dilemma, I guess. An author you've encountered and found somewhat nice, although getting gradually more arrogant and self-centred. A book that's thoroughly laboured and that in a number of ways goes for something one might probably consider laudable. On top of that, I liked Negarestani's previous book, Cyclonopedia - mostly for the rather intriguing writing style, or aesthetics of writing, over the time of browsing through his writings finding the actual philosophy behind it not so intelligent, I guess. But to a large extent, the writing compensated for it, though, probably more in the way of Timothy Morton and the 'playful' rather than rigorous approach to philosophical ideas. Here is a dramatic twist, towards a language that couldn't have been dryer and more detached, and that makes it in particular hard to argue against.
So, what's the problem with Intelligence and Spirit? While I so much don't want to go into the analytical / continental divide in philosophy, as not that much interested in the first, I don't think I would really consider working with Quine, Kripke, Popper or Searle really illegitimate, just not something that floats my boat that much. My impression is that there is always too much assumed and then worked out, without much reflection into the assumptions. (I want to stress that here I am talking merely in the domain of subjective opinion - that I am not much into it without saying that analytical philosophy is somewhat wrong). And I think that despite efforts to do some broaching the divide that might be as such welcome, Intelligence and Spirit simply chooses its sides and hides this choice under a fairly dense, though for much part comprehensible series of arguments.
I remember the book being promoted as a defense of rationalism against postmodernism and poststructuralism, and well, I can't say that I feel even remotely convinced. As much as I take it, the idea is that if we are able to articulate reason in such a way as to process and navigate contingency and complexity, the condition is meant to be somewhat overcome. Well... I don't think that it's too wrong to say that at the heart of the continental / analytical divide, there lies the work of Immanuel Kant, and Negarestani's work has for many years been drawing on, responding to and seeking to correct / critique the work of Nick Land, who is often said to be a meticulous reader of Kant. In Shania Twain's words, that don't impress me much. There's even a review in Cosmos and History journal by Vincent Le, subtitled Negarestani vs. Land, which reads this book as a response to Land's project on BitCoin and philosophy. Which is not to say that there isn't much in this book that responds to different things. Nevertheless, the thing where the troubles start is that by granting Land a sort of position at the point of entry into continental philosophy is, mildly said, problematic. Let me try to sketch this briefly 'methodologically'. Recently, reading a bit of Bergson and Deleuze, it came to me instantly that there's a lot in Bergson that Deleuze must have found formidable and worthy of exploring, which however, doesn't rule out that it's become quickly obvious that the Bergsonian view of the subject is still 'all too human' and can easily reify its own structure and demands upon philosophy. No way that a nietzschean thinker can be satisfied with this, which in this view posits Deleuze as being impressed and able to build on lots of Bergson's insights, concepts and ideas, but the goals towards which those are mobilized are simply not the same as Bergson's. In different ways, there is some 'doing' of something to Bergson, the result of which, well, is rather Deleuze saying things about Begson that Bergson wouldn't have probably said about himself. But also, it's not to say that by reading Bergson, one is better posited to understand what Deleuze is doing...
With Land, I have been simply struggling to find a coherent sense of what he is doing with the resources that he is building on, and if there is such deliberate intention, a 'what is he doing', it doesn't seem in any way transparent. So, either one is to take for granted the results, as either unstated or perhaps deliberately concealed and always allowing Land to claim on commentaries that it's not what he is doing / arguing, or that there just isn't a 'goal' of this sort and the philosophizing is working just for the sake of itself. Not like I want to judge here, I'm just not very interested in digging further.
However, at the end of the Negarestani's book, I think it's in the chapter where Land is actually mentioned by name, there's a 'discovery' of late Plato as launching a vicious attacks on Gods and superstitions, linked with a dismissal of the 'postmodern' fixation on aesthetics and metaphysics. Well, I guess that the typical poststructuralist answer would be that, well, in fact you already started with a position articulated in a particular position towards aesthetics and metaphysics, so it's rather more honest to admit it and perhaps re-examine it than bet on it being perfectly free from it and your position being the most tenable whatsoever. It's not necessarily to want religion back, nor out of a desire to be 'artsy-fartsy'.
In this sense, I would, going back to Kant being at the heart of the analytical/continental split, just remark, that despite using a little Hegel for 'correcting' Kant's ideas about rationality and language, I find the approach of the book still much more neo-Kantian than actually Hegelian. Around 30 to 50 pages into the book, the problems started, by Negarestani simply bypassing a couple of questions which I would find as legitimately Hegelian with regards to the philosophical foundations of the project, I guess, assuming that some of the elements of the Kantian position providing much comfort. I can't imagine this otherwise as that of subsuming the Hegelian circular pattern of the dialectic into a rather progressive sense of time (not like this wouldn't be problematized, especially in the chapter on Boltzmann, though I don't see this coming anywhere close to where I found the major attacks on Kant in Hegel). I admit that this is really just a sketchy claim, though what I have been trying to get to is that in Hegel, I see numerous ontological claims to the foundations of Kant's system re-examined, and although Hegel seems to accept some of them, it's slightly different to not take them for granted than, well, starting from the somewhat comfortable position that they offer as assumptions / givens. Of course, a lot of this is challenged, re-examined and reworked second hand by Negarestani, often very convincingly, but the point is elsewhere. I am not in the position to document this in detail, nor I really care to pick this book up again. Though, once here, I don't see much of it convincing - for example, Negarestani claims that conservative humanism and post-humanism are two sides of the same coin, and if I understand it correctly that the conservative humanism is the one of Kant, then I am doubly suspicious of whether as an image of the human, all that is important is being said, or that whether an undoing of such humanism does pull far enough to account for all the possible residuals.
In the end, I don't really know, if a detailed reconstruction of the Kantian transcendental psychology is the way to go, as, for example, by attempting to provide a picture of the opening scene from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monkey touches the monolith and runs away screaming in a way that is not mediated by language, one gets arguably an already very particular sense of what sensory experience and imaging is without language, and as the problem with the Kantian position as being already containing choices of metaphysical and aesthetic nature is arguably, again, doubled down on.
It's in the first chapter, I think around page 30, that we are told, that in Hegel's take on the spirit, we are faced with a choice of giving a concept to ourselves - if we refuse to do so, our lives would be boring and purposeless, if we choose to do so, the risks are those of erring and confusing greatly. I find this as already a bit of an intellectual blackmail, in the sense that if in Hegel we are in demand of a full and clear picture, then, does this prohibit us from looking at other cultures and historical experience as nevertheless giving oneself at least a very partial sense and concept to oneself, with all the flaws and inadequacies as material to be learned from, and start cautiously from there in the form of a less all-or-nothing approach to this task? And, with respect to the automaton / toy philosophy reconstruction of the Kantian cognitive system by adding parts to a toy robot as a manner of saying where autonomous intelligence starts, is there anything to be learned from, say, animals non-linguistic biosemiotics and / or, for example, biochemical means of precognitive sensory communication? I can imagine this being used as a very important possible means of double-checking about whether the assumed image of an automaton pre-linguistically sensing through the opening scene with the monolith is adequate enough as a starting point.
I would propose, that I would find a much more fruitful approach to reason and normativity Hegel's works on law, apart from also allowing for thinking shared rationality, deviations from it and dynamics to it - that would actually bypass a number of the risks of the intellectual quicksand that drags one into Kant, but then, the difficulty with writing this review is that one can't go really that far in defending the criticisms without carefully documenting them by references from a rather thick book that I don't feel in the spirit of digging through again. Neo-kantians will like this, those that are much more sceptical of such positions, or prefer to access Kant from different entry points than the First Critique (as if it was somewhat magically unrelated and independent of the number of difficulties in the ethical and, once again, aesthetical and metaphysical realms, or as if these could be just sublimated away).
Sure, I am not claiming that any of the quick bits I suggested above necessarily diminish the value or contradict the arguments in the book, which was not my purpose at all. I only see that it is constructed from what I see too much a leap of faith into a certain position with which it starts without that much of an ability to double-check that very position in itself, and in this sense, I would prefer a more comparative approach. This I see far from a sufficiently heretical and too much of a monological, almost a preacher-like take on things for one to be able to rave against Gods and metaphysics and all the souls damned in different ways than from what the author would like. I don't claim that it is necessarily illegitimate (even though I am inclined to think so), but as of myself, I do not really feel very convinced that this book is what I would see as the best possible approach to the philosophy of intelligence, nor as any sort of actual break-through in what I believe was meant to be its purpose.
There's this dilemma, I guess. An author you've encountered and found somewhat nice, although getting gradually more arrogant and self-centred. A book that's thoroughly laboured and that in a number of ways goes for something one might probably consider laudable. On top of that, I liked Negarestani's previous book, Cyclonopedia - mostly for the rather intriguing writing style, or aesthetics of writing, over the time of browsing through his writings finding the actual philosophy behind it not so intelligent, I guess. But to a large extent, the writing compensated for it, though, probably more in the way of Timothy Morton and the 'playful' rather than rigorous approach to philosophical ideas. Here is a dramatic twist, towards a language that couldn't have been dryer and more detached, and that makes it in particular hard to argue against.
So, what's the problem with Intelligence and Spirit? While I so much don't want to go into the analytical / continental divide in philosophy, as not that much interested in the first, I don't think I would really consider working with Quine, Kripke, Popper or Searle really illegitimate, just not something that floats my boat that much. My impression is that there is always too much assumed and then worked out, without much reflection into the assumptions. (I want to stress that here I am talking merely in the domain of subjective opinion - that I am not much into it without saying that analytical philosophy is somewhat wrong). And I think that despite efforts to do some broaching the divide that might be as such welcome, Intelligence and Spirit simply chooses its sides and hides this choice under a fairly dense, though for much part comprehensible series of arguments.
I remember the book being promoted as a defense of rationalism against postmodernism and poststructuralism, and well, I can't say that I feel even remotely convinced. As much as I take it, the idea is that if we are able to articulate reason in such a way as to process and navigate contingency and complexity, the condition is meant to be somewhat overcome. Well... I don't think that it's too wrong to say that at the heart of the continental / analytical divide, there lies the work of Immanuel Kant, and Negarestani's work has for many years been drawing on, responding to and seeking to correct / critique the work of Nick Land, who is often said to be a meticulous reader of Kant. In Shania Twain's words, that don't impress me much. There's even a review in Cosmos and History journal by Vincent Le, subtitled Negarestani vs. Land, which reads this book as a response to Land's project on BitCoin and philosophy. Which is not to say that there isn't much in this book that responds to different things. Nevertheless, the thing where the troubles start is that by granting Land a sort of position at the point of entry into continental philosophy is, mildly said, problematic. Let me try to sketch this briefly 'methodologically'. Recently, reading a bit of Bergson and Deleuze, it came to me instantly that there's a lot in Bergson that Deleuze must have found formidable and worthy of exploring, which however, doesn't rule out that it's become quickly obvious that the Bergsonian view of the subject is still 'all too human' and can easily reify its own structure and demands upon philosophy. No way that a nietzschean thinker can be satisfied with this, which in this view posits Deleuze as being impressed and able to build on lots of Bergson's insights, concepts and ideas, but the goals towards which those are mobilized are simply not the same as Bergson's. In different ways, there is some 'doing' of something to Bergson, the result of which, well, is rather Deleuze saying things about Begson that Bergson wouldn't have probably said about himself. But also, it's not to say that by reading Bergson, one is better posited to understand what Deleuze is doing...
With Land, I have been simply struggling to find a coherent sense of what he is doing with the resources that he is building on, and if there is such deliberate intention, a 'what is he doing', it doesn't seem in any way transparent. So, either one is to take for granted the results, as either unstated or perhaps deliberately concealed and always allowing Land to claim on commentaries that it's not what he is doing / arguing, or that there just isn't a 'goal' of this sort and the philosophizing is working just for the sake of itself. Not like I want to judge here, I'm just not very interested in digging further.
However, at the end of the Negarestani's book, I think it's in the chapter where Land is actually mentioned by name, there's a 'discovery' of late Plato as launching a vicious attacks on Gods and superstitions, linked with a dismissal of the 'postmodern' fixation on aesthetics and metaphysics. Well, I guess that the typical poststructuralist answer would be that, well, in fact you already started with a position articulated in a particular position towards aesthetics and metaphysics, so it's rather more honest to admit it and perhaps re-examine it than bet on it being perfectly free from it and your position being the most tenable whatsoever. It's not necessarily to want religion back, nor out of a desire to be 'artsy-fartsy'.
In this sense, I would, going back to Kant being at the heart of the analytical/continental split, just remark, that despite using a little Hegel for 'correcting' Kant's ideas about rationality and language, I find the approach of the book still much more neo-Kantian than actually Hegelian. Around 30 to 50 pages into the book, the problems started, by Negarestani simply bypassing a couple of questions which I would find as legitimately Hegelian with regards to the philosophical foundations of the project, I guess, assuming that some of the elements of the Kantian position providing much comfort. I can't imagine this otherwise as that of subsuming the Hegelian circular pattern of the dialectic into a rather progressive sense of time (not like this wouldn't be problematized, especially in the chapter on Boltzmann, though I don't see this coming anywhere close to where I found the major attacks on Kant in Hegel). I admit that this is really just a sketchy claim, though what I have been trying to get to is that in Hegel, I see numerous ontological claims to the foundations of Kant's system re-examined, and although Hegel seems to accept some of them, it's slightly different to not take them for granted than, well, starting from the somewhat comfortable position that they offer as assumptions / givens. Of course, a lot of this is challenged, re-examined and reworked second hand by Negarestani, often very convincingly, but the point is elsewhere. I am not in the position to document this in detail, nor I really care to pick this book up again. Though, once here, I don't see much of it convincing - for example, Negarestani claims that conservative humanism and post-humanism are two sides of the same coin, and if I understand it correctly that the conservative humanism is the one of Kant, then I am doubly suspicious of whether as an image of the human, all that is important is being said, or that whether an undoing of such humanism does pull far enough to account for all the possible residuals.
In the end, I don't really know, if a detailed reconstruction of the Kantian transcendental psychology is the way to go, as, for example, by attempting to provide a picture of the opening scene from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monkey touches the monolith and runs away screaming in a way that is not mediated by language, one gets arguably an already very particular sense of what sensory experience and imaging is without language, and as the problem with the Kantian position as being already containing choices of metaphysical and aesthetic nature is arguably, again, doubled down on.
It's in the first chapter, I think around page 30, that we are told, that in Hegel's take on the spirit, we are faced with a choice of giving a concept to ourselves - if we refuse to do so, our lives would be boring and purposeless, if we choose to do so, the risks are those of erring and confusing greatly. I find this as already a bit of an intellectual blackmail, in the sense that if in Hegel we are in demand of a full and clear picture, then, does this prohibit us from looking at other cultures and historical experience as nevertheless giving oneself at least a very partial sense and concept to oneself, with all the flaws and inadequacies as material to be learned from, and start cautiously from there in the form of a less all-or-nothing approach to this task? And, with respect to the automaton / toy philosophy reconstruction of the Kantian cognitive system by adding parts to a toy robot as a manner of saying where autonomous intelligence starts, is there anything to be learned from, say, animals non-linguistic biosemiotics and / or, for example, biochemical means of precognitive sensory communication? I can imagine this being used as a very important possible means of double-checking about whether the assumed image of an automaton pre-linguistically sensing through the opening scene with the monolith is adequate enough as a starting point.
I would propose, that I would find a much more fruitful approach to reason and normativity Hegel's works on law, apart from also allowing for thinking shared rationality, deviations from it and dynamics to it - that would actually bypass a number of the risks of the intellectual quicksand that drags one into Kant, but then, the difficulty with writing this review is that one can't go really that far in defending the criticisms without carefully documenting them by references from a rather thick book that I don't feel in the spirit of digging through again. Neo-kantians will like this, those that are much more sceptical of such positions, or prefer to access Kant from different entry points than the First Critique (as if it was somewhat magically unrelated and independent of the number of difficulties in the ethical and, once again, aesthetical and metaphysical realms, or as if these could be just sublimated away).
Sure, I am not claiming that any of the quick bits I suggested above necessarily diminish the value or contradict the arguments in the book, which was not my purpose at all. I only see that it is constructed from what I see too much a leap of faith into a certain position with which it starts without that much of an ability to double-check that very position in itself, and in this sense, I would prefer a more comparative approach. This I see far from a sufficiently heretical and too much of a monological, almost a preacher-like take on things for one to be able to rave against Gods and metaphysics and all the souls damned in different ways than from what the author would like. I don't claim that it is necessarily illegitimate (even though I am inclined to think so), but as of myself, I do not really feel very convinced that this book is what I would see as the best possible approach to the philosophy of intelligence, nor as any sort of actual break-through in what I believe was meant to be its purpose.
December 1, 2025
From Hegels Logic:
*Thought regarded as an activity*
§ 20
«If we take our prima facie impression of thought, we find on examination first (a) that, in its usual subjective acceptation, thought is one out of many activities or faculties of the mind, coordinate with such others as sensation, perception, imagination, desire, volition, and the like. The product of this activity, the form or character peculiar to thought, is the UNIVERSAL, or, in general, the abstract. Thought, regarded as an activity, may be accordingly described as the active universal, and, since the deed, its product, is the universal once more, may be called the self-actualising universal. Thought conceived as a subject (agent) is a thinker, and the subject existing as a thinker is simply denoted by the term 'I'.»
Shit maybe this Negarestani guy wasn’t such a dummy after all. This gives a whole other flavour to the idea of the singularity. Current LLMs are still stochastic parrots, or at least they are not full on reasoning agents, yet. But what happens when they become that? Does this represent the self-actualisation of the Universal mediated through technological means?
The concept of consciousness is too muddied, so let’s leave that aside, but what happens when Objective Thought can manifest itself, unmediated by flawed humans, but actualising itself directly?
Humans creating systems that supersede their subjectivity, becoming the new substrate for Reason. What a thought!
*Thought regarded as an activity*
§ 20
«If we take our prima facie impression of thought, we find on examination first (a) that, in its usual subjective acceptation, thought is one out of many activities or faculties of the mind, coordinate with such others as sensation, perception, imagination, desire, volition, and the like. The product of this activity, the form or character peculiar to thought, is the UNIVERSAL, or, in general, the abstract. Thought, regarded as an activity, may be accordingly described as the active universal, and, since the deed, its product, is the universal once more, may be called the self-actualising universal. Thought conceived as a subject (agent) is a thinker, and the subject existing as a thinker is simply denoted by the term 'I'.»
Shit maybe this Negarestani guy wasn’t such a dummy after all. This gives a whole other flavour to the idea of the singularity. Current LLMs are still stochastic parrots, or at least they are not full on reasoning agents, yet. But what happens when they become that? Does this represent the self-actualisation of the Universal mediated through technological means?
The concept of consciousness is too muddied, so let’s leave that aside, but what happens when Objective Thought can manifest itself, unmediated by flawed humans, but actualising itself directly?
Humans creating systems that supersede their subjectivity, becoming the new substrate for Reason. What a thought!
March 26, 2025
To be honest, I only understood about 50% of it, and I’m being generous. Good points were absolutely made. Do I now question whether I myself am truly intelligent? Absolutely.
This is probably really good if you understand it so I’m giving it 4 stars
This is probably really good if you understand it so I’m giving it 4 stars
August 29, 2019
Dense but lucid. If you manage to finish the first chapter, then you are for a ride. Negarestani does a great job at disenchanting the ideas of the human and AI. He shows clearly that such concepts can only be talked about as fruits of a long historical labor. Very ambitious and thorough.
January 25, 2023
It took 3+ years and was 75% over my head but I finally finished. I loved it and I’m pretty sure it changed the way I think about life. I’ll probably be rereading and trying to figure this thing out for the next thirty years now.
May 6, 2021
Clear yet technical at times. A groundwork for something better. Review soon.
September 3, 2021
Complicated but riveting read
May 23, 2022
One of the best bluffs i've ever read.
Seriously, the interpretation of the Althusser's Marx has to be one of the best takes this book makes.
Seriously, the interpretation of the Althusser's Marx has to be one of the best takes this book makes.
January 19, 2024
One great book on contemporary philosophy. Truly inspiring!
August 1, 2020
Sprawling and brilliant, hard to encapsulate, if you want a balanced diet of philosophy of mind, science, and speculative philosophy that collapses the analytic/continental distinction and draws out a certain strand of the history of thought weaving through Plato, Hegel, Sellars, and Brandom among others, you're going to have a good time.
July 11, 2020
It was boring and repetitive. Sorry guys!
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