Abstract

Luca Baccelli, Barbara Henry and Federico Tomasello discuss Remo Bodei’s Dominio e sottomissione. Schiavi, animali, macchine, Intelligenza Artificiale (2019). The authors present Bodei’s historical and philosophical reconstruction of the intertwined relationships between structures of social and natural dominance, human work and machines. Baccelli focuses on the philosophical variations of the Aristotelian justification of natural slavery in the Spanish debate of the Sixteenth Century, during the modern history of military and spiritual conquest of the American continent. Looking at Leonardo’s scientia machinale, Henry insists on the symbolic mediation between materiality and immateriality played by socio-technological tools throughout human history, even before the cybernetic revolution. Tomasello sheds light on the main challenges and opportunity inaugurated by the digital revolution with respect to the modern revolution of industrial technologies.