Are the philosophical virtues of clarity, rigour and explicitness aided by these astounding computational resources?

In this paper, I wish to consider how some of these technologies are affecting the teaching and learning of philosophy, as integral aspects of what it is to do philosophy, that is, its epistemic practices. By this I mean the means for the achievement of key epistemic goals of an area of enquiry, and the activities necessary for claims to be made and justified within a disciplinary area; what counts as 'playing the game'. Examples ranging from the natural sciences to the humanities are: dissecting, segmenting, relating, measuring, counting, comparing, classifying and categorising, defining, analysing, testing-by means of empirical test or 'thought experiment'; seeking counterexamples and counterfactuals, etc. From a sociological point of view: "An epistemic culture refers to 'those sets of practices, arrangements and mechanisms bound together by necessity, affinity and historical coincidence which, in a given area of professional expertise, make up how we know what we know." (Knorr-Cetina 2007: 363)

The material processes for doing philosophy-speaking, gesturing, writing in alphabetic or ideogrammatic form, or in any symbol system-have a deep effect on more abstract philosophical practices involved in thinking, reasoning, and understanding, and explaining, and it is in this sense that I have called them 'philosophy engines'. On one level, like epistemology engines, they make more easily available particular conceptions of the self in its relation to others; on the other, they engage and reinforce thinking and cognitive processes, such as syntactical rather than additive arrangements, analysis, formal reasoning, abstraction (Ong 1982; Carusi 2003:107) and other processes characteristic of formal discursive argument which have become synonymous with doing philosophy-or at least, modern Western philosophy.

What account of intentionality, meaning and expressivity will be intuitive to practitioners of philosophy who use these technologies for accessing and analysing multiple electronic texts? What account of mind, self and morality will be intuitive to human readers grasping text content through the intermediary of machine readers? To what extent will the thoughts we can entertain about human and social rationality depend upon the material limitations of programmability? These are some of the questions that the new technologies post to philosophers. Finally then, when philosophers avail themselves of the great potential of e-learning, it is worthwhile also to cast a philosophical eye on the machinery that underlies it.

The examples of computational technologies which could be viewed as potential 'philosophy engines' that I have given are meant to show how the mundane processes for accessing, organising, arranging and analysing electronic processes, even if not directly taken up for doing philosophy, could affect the epistemic practices of philosophy. The increase in the number of interpretational tasks relegated to computational resources combining Internet, analysis and interpretation tools and technologies will be powerful influences on the epistemic practices of intellectual endeavour generally, and are the epistemology and philosophy engines of the future.