Academic Activities

Book Talk with Yuk Hui “Kant Machine”

Date: 22 January, 2026 (Thu)

Time: 15:00 – 17:00 

Venue: RRS 401 (Room 401, Sir Run Run Shaw Building, HSH Campus, Hong Kong Baptist University) 

Language: English

*Participants who successfully registered the event will receive a confirmation email a few days before the event.*

Abstract

In Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy After AI, Yuk Hui defends the relevance of Kant for thinking about artificial intelligence today, by showing how the current debates on AI echo historical philosophical discussions about the workings of the mind. By situating AI in the history of philosophy and Kant in the history of technology, he asks 1) What kinds of machines are intelligent? 2) Are machines capable of being moral? 3) Does an algorithm of perpetual peace exist? The book places Kant's philosophy in conversations with key figures in histories of technology and philosophy from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Hubert Dreyfus. Kant Machine invites us to reconsider the ethical and political implications of AI and rethink the nature and limitations of AI through the Kantian lens.

Speaker

Prof. Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Prof. Hui is Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions and directs the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology. Hui studied computer engineering at the University of Hong Kong, wrote a PhD thesis under Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) at Goldsmiths University London, and obtained his Habilitation in philosophy from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Hui is author of several monographs that have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China:-An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), Recursivity and Contingency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press/e-flux, 2021), Post-Europe (Urbanomic/Sequence, 2024), Machine and Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and Kant Machine (Bloomsbury, 2026). Hui is co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015) and editor of Philosophy after Automation (Philosophy Today, Vol.65. No.2, 2021), Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction (2024) among others. Since 2014, Hui has been the convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology and sits as a juror of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture since 2020 (currently as jury chair).

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For any inquiries, please contact cae@hkbu.edu.hk.