David William Bates

David William Bates is Professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and past director of the Berkeley Center for New Media (2010-13). He works on two major research tracks. First, he studies the history of political and legal thought, with an emphasis on the relationship between authority, violence, emergency, and war in theories of constitutional government. He has published several essays on these issues, including articles on the thought of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. Second, he is researching the intersections between media, technology and cognition since the Scientific Revolution. His new book is "An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age," which explores the relations between cognition, technology, and the body in the machine age, from the 17th century to Artificial Intelligence.