Research Notes

Working papers, fragments, and observations from the lab. These notes are provisional by design — thinking in public about what interpretive artificial intelligence is and what it might become.

  • AI and Authenticity August 19, 2026 By Victor Shammas

    Much anti-AI positioning in academia rests on its weakest argument: authenticity. Drawing on Adorno, Bourdieu, Haraway, Stiegler, and social theorists, this note argues there is no pre-technological, "natural" self to protect — and asks what bolder forms of thinking and writing with AI higher education might pursue instead.

  • What Is Hermeneutic AI? July 3, 2026 By Victor Shammas & Vito Laterza

    Hermeneutics is the discipline of interpretation: the art and theory of understanding texts, actions, and forms of life. It runs from the exegesis of scripture through philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer to the interpretive turn in the social sciences — the insistence, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, that the study of culture is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”