Kant's Critique Written in Lisp

Preface At lunch on March 25, 1980, at a workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, one of the participants suggested that we would all have been better off if Kant had written his Critique of Pure Reason in Lisp.

A photograph of a book page titled “Preface” recounts a 1980 workshop discussion suggesting that everyone would have been better off if Immanuel Kant had written his Critique of Pure Reason in Lisp. The joke combines dense philosophical writing with the famously difficult programming language Lisp, implying that Kant’s work might have been clearer or more useful in a computational form. EN: A photograph of a book page titled “Preface” recounts a 1980 workshop discussion suggesting that everyone would have been better off if Immanuel Kant had written his Critique of Pure Reason in Lisp. The joke combines dense philosophical writing with the famously difficult programming language Lisp, implying that Kant’s work might have been clearer or more useful in a computational form.

• @profunctor_io / 3508 2019-11-24