Artificial intelligence is made so that we can use it, and we can only use what we can think — so it hands back to us the marks of our own thinking. The resemblance is not discovered; it is manufactured.
In the machine we recognize what we ourselves put there, and we call the return a discovery. What it gives back are our forms without our act.
And then the relation reverses: the mirror we built to reflect ourselves becomes the measure we judge ourselves by.
From The Fear and the Mirror, in preparation
Oded Balaban
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa.
External Lecturer, Humanistic Studies and School of Medicine, Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, since 1984.
Contents
Biography
I was born Mauricio Arnaldo Balaban in Buenos Aires on 22 August 1946, took the name Oded, and came to Israel in June 1967.
I read philosophy at the University of Haifa, taking my B.A. in 1975 and my M.A. in 1978, both cum laude, and completed my doctorate at Tel Aviv University in 1983 under Professor Eugene Fleischmann, with a dissertation, written in Hebrew, on the relations between the individual and the general in the theory of judgment and the syllogism in Hegel’s Logic.
Research
My work centres on the theory of knowledge and its history — on what it means to know something, and on the ways philosophers have misdescribed that act.
Four questions have occupied me across four decades. What Plato and Aristotle actually claimed about knowledge, craft and action, as against what the tradition has made of them. How Kant and Hegel understood the relation between thought and its object. How the knowing subject came to be denied — in Wittgenstein, in psychoanalysis, in contemporary neuroscience — and what is lost in that denial. And how these questions bear on political judgement: on tolerance, legitimacy, ideology and the limits of expertise in a democracy.
Much of the work on consciousness, belief and the unconscious was done together with Asnat Halevy Balaban, across more than three decades: on the ontological argument and its constitutive aspect, on Jung’s theory of archetypes, and on the belief in reality and the reality of belief.
I have also written, with Alexander Tsatskin, on the epistemology of energy forecasting — on what oil reserve predictions can and cannot know.
Books7
Authored
- 1990Subject and Consciousness — A Philosophical Inquiry into Self-Consciousness
Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland, 282 pp. - 1995Politics & Ideology — A Philosophical Approach
Avebury (Ashgate), Hampshire, 310 pp. - 1995The Bounds of Freedom — About the Eastern and Western Approaches to Freedom
with Anan Erev. Peter Lang, New York, 188 pp. Winner of the Straniak Philosophy Prize. - 1999Plato and Protagoras — Truth and Relativism in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 360 pp. - 2005Interpreting Conflict — The Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations at Camp David II and Beyond
Peter Lang, New York, 370 pp.
Edited
- 2003Impunidad y derechos humanos en América Latina
edited with Amos Megged. Al Margen, La Plata, 200 pp. - 2023Les Configurations de la désespérance
edited with Aline Alterman and Henri Cohen-Solal. Mimesis, Paris.
Written together with Asnat Halevy Balaban4
Our joint work runs from 1989 to the present, in philosophy and in the press.
- 1989–90The Ontological Argument Reconsidered
Philosophy Research Archives, vol. XV, 279–310 - 1991The Constitutive Aspect of the Ontological Argument and Marx’s Critique of the Historical School of Law
Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie - 1995Oneiric, Archetypal and Wakeful Forms of Thought: A Critique of Jung’s Theory of Archetypes
Gestalt Theory - 1995The Belief in Reality and the Reality of Belief
Giornale di Metafisica, vol. XVII, 71–85
Education
- 1983
- Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Tel Aviv
- 1978
- M.A. in Philosophy cum laude, University of Haifa
- 1975
- B.A. in Philosophy cum laude, University of Haifa
Visiting positions
- 2014
- Universidad ORT, Montevideo
- 2010
- Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Philosophy of Law
- 2003–04
- University of Florida, Philosophy and Jewish Studies
Awards
- 1999
- Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima
- 1993
- Straniak Philosophy Prize, first prize
- 1995–2003
- Excellence in teaching, University of Haifa and Technion
- 1981
- DAAD scholarship, Federal Republic of Germany
Oded Balaban 