SARAH BORRETT

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Sarah Borrett’s research bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of German idealism and artificial intelligence, forging a unique path in the philosophy of robotics. Her most-cited work, “Hegelian Phenomenology and Robotics” (2011, 6 citations), offers a groundbreaking formalism that repositions the robot not as a passive object of human interpretation, but as an active subject capable of interpreting its own experience. In this paper, Borrett introduces a regulative definition of meaningful experience for robots, where present sensible input is deemed meaningful when it can be integrated into a broader, self-aware narrative—a concept directly inspired by Hegel’s *Phenomenology of Spirit*. While her citation count reflects a niche but deeply engaged audience, her contribution is notable for its conceptual audacity: she challenges the dominant computationalist paradigm by arguing that robotic consciousness, if possible, must be understood through a dialectical process of self-recognition. Borrett’s work is essential reading for scholars at the intersection of phenomenology, cognitive science, and AI ethics, offering a philosophical scaffold for future research on machine subjectivity and the nature of experience itself.