David Bates (Rhetoric) offers a new history of human intelligence, arguing that humans know themselves by knowing their machines. We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies — autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to Bates, emerged in the 17th century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, he reveals how technological developments repeatedly offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy.

Bates is joined by Victoria Khan (English).