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Abstract: With the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models, the number of artificial texts we encounter on a daily basis is about to increase substantially. This essay asks how this new textual situation may influence what one can call the “standard expectation of unknown texts,” which has always included the assumption that any text is the work of a human being. As more and more artificial writing begins to circulate, the essay argues, this standard expectation will shift—first, from the immediate assumption of human authorship to, second, a creeping doubt: did a machine write this? In the wake of what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called the “textpocalypse,” however, this state cannot be permanent. The author suggests that after this second transitional period, one may suspend the question of origins and, third, take on a post-artificial stance. One would then focus only on what a text says, not on who wrote it; post-artificial writing would be read with an agnostic attitude about its origins. This essay explores the implications of such post-artificiality by looking back to the early days of text synthesis, considering the limitations of aesthetic Turing tests, and indulging in reasoned speculation about the future of literary and nonliterary text generation.

The distinction between public and private spheres has become increasingly blurred in the digital age. As more aspects of life move online, where information is potentially visible to anyone, traditional barriers dividing public and private realms dissolve. This creates a default condition of publicness for much online activity. In response, Internet users have developed novel ways of demarcating contexts as more public or more private through "gestures" (Vilém Flusser) that range from literal bodily movements to highly context-dependent and media-specific signs. This essay argues that in digital environments, the notions of "public" and "private" take on active, performative dimensions as verbs - "publicking" and "privating." Users engage in ongoing yet subtle negotiations to establish "spaces of appearance" (Hannah Arendt) and signify communication as directed toward distinct audiences. The essay criticizes classic theories of the public sphere as inadequate for digital life. It proposes recasting the distinction as fluid and gestural rather than stable and institutional. Although overlooked as trivial, micro-gestures of publicking and privating enable users to perform publicness and privateness in a time in which the public has become an act rather than a place. Studying these fleeting yet meaningful gestures provides insight into how users resist the default publicness of contemporary digital life., Author(s): Hannes Bajohr [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) https://ror.org/02s6k3f65, grid.6612.3, 0000 0004 1937 0642, Department Arts, Media, Philosophy, University of Basel, , Holbeinstr. 12, 4051, Basel, Switzerland Introduction Crises often act [...]

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This extract is the first English translation of Hans Blumenberg's posthumous publication Beschreibung des Menschen, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2006. Based on lectures concerning the German tradition of philosophical anthropology that Blumenberg gave at the University of Münster, the book's basic project is the explicit fusion of Husserlian phenomenology with philosophical anthropology — an attempt to grasp what the human is by identifying its basic structures. The result is a highly nuanced conception of the possibility of human self‐reflection that is at the core of philosophy and of culture as a recipe for the species' survival. Instead of answering the question "What is man?" Blumenberg proposes here a minimalist anthropology that seeks to answer a different question: "How is man possible?" The chapters selected for translation are intended to give readers a sense of the book, little known in the Anglophone world, which in its original German runs to some nine hundred pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew Hines, Metaphor in European Philosophy after Nietzsche: An Intellectual History (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020), 209 pp. Pasi Ihalainen and Antero Holmila, eds., Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022), 364 pp. Javier Fernández Sebastián, Historia conceptual en el Atlántico Ibérico: Lenguajes, tiempos, revoluciones [Conceptual history in the Iberian Atlantic: Languages, temporalities, revolutions] (Madrid: FCE, 2021), 571 pp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]