Editorial
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Adrià Harillo Pla
For too long, our philosophical and cultural conversations about robots have been dominated by utilitarian and ethical concerns, conversations which clearly hold an enormous value. In this special issue, however, the intention was to address the topic keeping the focus of attention on the aesthetics, and sensual implications of these relations.
In this special issue, the word “sensuality” refers not only to mere physical or sexual contact but also to the way a machine can sense, the importance of language in engaging with a robot, the validity of the feelings generated in the interaction, or even how some of this technology could lead to an apathy leading to a reduction in the number of aesthetic experiences, or the nature of those.
In order to achieve that multiple authors contributed to this publication. As the reader will find, first, Steven Santer puts the focus on the robot. He does that from his expertise in design.
Second, Rachel McNealis addresses the topic of sex robots and some of their potential positive and negative impacts. After that, Cécilia Andrée Monique Lombard and Daniel D. Novotný address the topic of sex and love with robots tracing relations to important authors who worked on the subject, such as Aristotle or Sartre. The conclusion of the authors is that, at least from an Aristotelian or Sartreian perspective, neither Aristotle nor Sartre would endorse love-robots, nowadays, as tools for our social well-being.
Giving continuity to this special issue, Alberte Romme Bangsgaard, Cecilia Kløve Ryelund, Mathilde Marie Lind Nilsson, and Anders Søgaard analyze a very important topic when thinking of sex and love with robots, or chatbots: the subject of empathy. This group reports that the usage of chatbots might lead to reduced interest in physical relationships.
Precisely on the subject of language, in his article, Miroslav Vacura touches on the importance of large language models (LLM), and how that allows these robots to interact emotionally, intimately, and sensually without being judgmental or rejecting users, being this a technological improvement for these purposes.
To conclude, Luis de Miranda addresses the topic of technology and its impact on philosophical health, something important for the overall framework of the discussion that this special issue from Open Philosophy covers.
As the editor of this issue, I want to thank every author and also acknowledge the high quality of some of the articles which were submitted, but were not included. The topic of sex robots, intimate chatbots, and how we, humans, interact with technology aesthetically is of high importance, and I am convinced it will become even more important in the following years.
This special issue is another step in this discussion, and I could not be more happy being part of it.
© 2025 the author(s), published by De Gruyter
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special issue: Sensuality and Robots: An Aesthetic Approach to Human-Robot Interactions, edited by Adrià Harillo Pla
- Editorial
- Sensual Environmental Robots: Entanglements of Speculative Realist Ideas with Design Theory and Practice
- Technically Getting Off: On the Hope, Disgust, and Time of Robo-Erotics
- Aristotle and Sartre on Eros and Love-Robots
- Digital Friends and Empathy Blindness
- Bridging the Emotional Gap: Philosophical Insights into Sensual Robots with Large Language Model Technology
- Can and Should AI Help Us Quantify Philosophical Health?
- Special issue: Existence and Nonexistence in the History of Logic, edited by Graziana Ciola (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands), Milo Crimi (University of Montevallo, USA), and Calvin Normore (University of California in Los Angeles, USA) - Part II
- The Power of Predication and Quantification
- A Unifying Double-Reference Approach to Semantic Paradoxes: From the White-Horse-Not-Horse Paradox and the Ultimate-Unspeakable Paradox to the Liar Paradox in View of the Principle of Noncontradiction
- The Zhou Puzzle: A Peek Into Quantification in Mohist Logic
- Empty Reference in Sixteenth-Century Nominalism: John Mair’s Case
- Did Aristotle have a Doctrine of Existential Import?
- Nonexistent Objects: The Avicenna Transform
- Existence and Nonexistence in the History of Logic: Afterword
- Special issue: Philosophical Approaches to Games and Gamification: Ethical, Aesthetic, Technological and Political Perspectives, edited by Giannis Perperidis (Ionian University, Greece)
- Thinking Games: Philosophical Explorations in the Digital Age
- On What Makes Some Video Games Philosophical
- Playable Concepts? For a Critique of Videogame Reason
- The Gamification of Games and Inhibited Play
- Rethinking Gamification within a Genealogy of Governmental Discourses
- Integrating Ethics of Technology into a Serious Game: The Case of Tethics
- Battlefields of Play & Games: From a Method of Comparative Ludology to a Strategy of Ecosophic Ludic Architecture
- Research Articles
- Being Is a Being
- What Do Science and Historical Denialists Deny – If Any – When Addressing Certainties in Wittgenstein’s Sense?
- A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis of Ovid’s “Narcissus and Echo”: Toward the Obstinate Persistence of the Relational
- What Makes a Prediction Arbitrary? A Proposal
- Self-Driving Cars, Trolley Problems, and the Value of Human Life: An Argument Against Abstracting Human Characteristics
- Arche and Nous in Heidegger’s and Aristotle’s Understanding of Phronesis
- Demons as Decolonial Hyperobjects: Uneven Histories of Hauntology
- Expression and Expressiveness according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special issue: Sensuality and Robots: An Aesthetic Approach to Human-Robot Interactions, edited by Adrià Harillo Pla
- Editorial
- Sensual Environmental Robots: Entanglements of Speculative Realist Ideas with Design Theory and Practice
- Technically Getting Off: On the Hope, Disgust, and Time of Robo-Erotics
- Aristotle and Sartre on Eros and Love-Robots
- Digital Friends and Empathy Blindness
- Bridging the Emotional Gap: Philosophical Insights into Sensual Robots with Large Language Model Technology
- Can and Should AI Help Us Quantify Philosophical Health?
- Special issue: Existence and Nonexistence in the History of Logic, edited by Graziana Ciola (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands), Milo Crimi (University of Montevallo, USA), and Calvin Normore (University of California in Los Angeles, USA) - Part II
- The Power of Predication and Quantification
- A Unifying Double-Reference Approach to Semantic Paradoxes: From the White-Horse-Not-Horse Paradox and the Ultimate-Unspeakable Paradox to the Liar Paradox in View of the Principle of Noncontradiction
- The Zhou Puzzle: A Peek Into Quantification in Mohist Logic
- Empty Reference in Sixteenth-Century Nominalism: John Mair’s Case
- Did Aristotle have a Doctrine of Existential Import?
- Nonexistent Objects: The Avicenna Transform
- Existence and Nonexistence in the History of Logic: Afterword
- Special issue: Philosophical Approaches to Games and Gamification: Ethical, Aesthetic, Technological and Political Perspectives, edited by Giannis Perperidis (Ionian University, Greece)
- Thinking Games: Philosophical Explorations in the Digital Age
- On What Makes Some Video Games Philosophical
- Playable Concepts? For a Critique of Videogame Reason
- The Gamification of Games and Inhibited Play
- Rethinking Gamification within a Genealogy of Governmental Discourses
- Integrating Ethics of Technology into a Serious Game: The Case of Tethics
- Battlefields of Play & Games: From a Method of Comparative Ludology to a Strategy of Ecosophic Ludic Architecture
- Research Articles
- Being Is a Being
- What Do Science and Historical Denialists Deny – If Any – When Addressing Certainties in Wittgenstein’s Sense?
- A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis of Ovid’s “Narcissus and Echo”: Toward the Obstinate Persistence of the Relational
- What Makes a Prediction Arbitrary? A Proposal
- Self-Driving Cars, Trolley Problems, and the Value of Human Life: An Argument Against Abstracting Human Characteristics
- Arche and Nous in Heidegger’s and Aristotle’s Understanding of Phronesis
- Demons as Decolonial Hyperobjects: Uneven Histories of Hauntology
- Expression and Expressiveness according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty
