10Research area
Phenomenology
Attention to how things show up, before theorising about what they are.
Phenomenology, the tradition running from Husserl through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, is often cast as the opposite of the philosophy of AI: humanist, anti-computational, concerned with lived experience rather than information. Yet it has the most detailed available accounts of intentionality, of embodiment, and of how tools become transparent in use, and each bears directly on systems that produce meaning-like output without a body or a world.
What it offers is a discipline of description: before asking whether a system understands, describe carefully what it is like to be answered by it.