2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

O N THE VARIOUS MEANINGS OF “X IS NOT A SCIENCE”
who was a philosopher by training, concludes his survey of the various philosophies with
some sharp comments on existentialism, and writes:
The raising of personal preoccupations to the dignity of philosophical
problems is far too likely to lead to a sort of shop-girl metaphysics, which
may be pardonable as a didactic method, but is extremely dangerous if it allows
people to play fast-and-loose with the mission incumbent upon philosophy
until science becomes strong enough to replace it: that is, to
understand being in relationship to itself and not in relationship to myself. 20
In spite of their relative vagueness, these few quotations provide some essential coor-
dinates for the discussion to follow. First, they force a few terminological remarks. In these
texts, the key terms “philosophy” and “science” have a stronger meaning than it is usually
attributed to them in recent discussions of the topic. As the quoted authors make clear,
tends to be a synonym for and my analysis will adopt this
interpretation of the term. In so doing, I will leave aside two other interpretations that are
much more common in contemporary discussions focusing on the “Philosophy of Artificial
Intelligence.” Often, such analysis will use the locution “philosophy of X” to indicate either
an examination of the conceptual foundations of discipline X or an assessment of the inter-
nal (logical, etc.) structure of X. Philosophy, in this context, becomes a quite contentless
tool to be applied to the discipline that does not bring along any new information but just a
more or less sophisticated analytic methodology. 21 In other words, “philosophy” is used in
the sense of special metaphysics discussed above as the “narrower a-priori inquiry.”
The use of the term in the texts at stake here, instead, is quite substan-
tive. So much so, in fact, that it may be generally taken, at least provisionally, as equivalent
to the Aristotelian “science of being as being” mentioned above. This interpretation broad-
ens the scope quite considerably, far beyond certain interpretations of the term as, for ex-
ample, “theory of rationality,” which has been used in other discussions of the relationship
20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955); Engl. tr. Tristes Tropiques (New York: Penguin
Books, 1992) 58.
21. This is the sense of “philosophy” at work in most of the essays contained in the popular anthologies
edited by John Haugeland, Mind Design (Cambridge,: MIT Press, 1985) and Margaret Boden, The
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence…
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