Tobias shifts our thinking from the anthropocene to the microbiocene.

Tobias is a philosopher and the founding director of the Berggruen Institute’s Transformations of the Human Program. He also serves as Reid Hoffman professor of humanities at the New School for Social Research and is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has also worked as an advisor for many North American and European Universities for how to re-invent the human sciences, and is the author of dozens of articles and three books: Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008), Plastic Reason (2016), and most recently of After Ethnos (2018). 

The focus of his work is on the philosophy, poetry, and politics of the contemporary. Tobias' work on the brain, on microbes, snails, and AI has increasingly given rise to two observations that have come to define his work: (1) A distinctive feature of the present is that the question concerning the human occurs less in the human than in the non-human sciences, e.g. in microbiome research, in AI, or in the study of climate change. (2) The tentative answers that are emerging from these non-human fields radically defy the understanding of the human as more than mere nature and as other than mere machines on which the human sciences were built.

What to do with the displacement of questions that defined the arts into the fields of the sciences and engineering? Alone and together with colleagues in philosophy, art, and the sciences/engineering Tobias has sought to build conceptual and institutional possibilities for addressing just this question.

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