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24. January 2024

Call for Application: Forum Humanum Fellowship/Fall Institute: 'Limits of Intelligence: Meaning and Value' (Deadline: 29.02.2024) Call for Application: Forum Humanum Fellowship: 'Limits of Intelligence: Meaning and Value' (Deadline: 29.02.2024)

In association with the Udo Keller Stiftung Forum Humanum and the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies (University of Bonn), the International Centre for Philosophy (IZPH) is offering up to 10 Forum Humanum fellowships to qualified doctoral and masters students from any department in the social sciences or humanities at the University of Bonn to participate in an event to be held at the recently founded Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities at the New School for Social Research (NYC).

Researchers within the TRA 4 – Individuals, Institutions and Societies investigate how institutions mediate complex relationships between individuals and society and from there develop a new view of micro-phenomena (development of personality, agency, individualization) as well as macro-phenomena (world society, globalization). Sharing this research objective, the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities is founded on the premise that genuine knowledge acquisition, truth and objectivity are not the exclusive preserve of any single discipline or method. The concepts we deploy to understand and evaluate human cultural and scientific achievements also have to be placed within their broader social, political and intellectual context and therefore have to be approached from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. The Institute thus aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines and draw on the resources of the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities more generally, in order to pursue a collaborative understanding of the nature and goals of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines and to grapple with the challenges they face in light of the increasing prevalence of intellectual models imported from other disciplines.

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This year’s event will take place on September 30-October 4, 2024 and will consist in a week-long series of seminars, guest lectures and workshops on the topic of The Limits of Intelligence: Meaning and Value. Modern knowledge-societies value intelligence as a set of problem-solving capacities. In recent years, we could be said to have entered not only a so-called “AI summer”, but even a “technology summer”. This imaginary draws on accelerated progress in AI research and the large-scale socio-economic and political implementation of ‘intelligence’ technology. In our fall workshop at the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities, we will question some of the key assumptions underlying this socio-political constellation: What, if anything, are the limits of intelligence? Which concepts of intelligence, rationality, and thought are operative in AI research and techno-scientific progress? What are limits of such intelligence? In particular, we will focus on existential and linguistic meaning as potential limits to intelligent processing. Our goal is to trace the contours of a novel type of ethics of intelligence (including the “ethics of AI”, a discipline currently in high demand) that takes into account the fuzzy, historically changing, and apparently non-computable nature of values. This requires us to recalibrate our sense of what it is to understand meaning and value in an age in which intelligence and even understanding seem to emerge in the realm of our techno-scientific artifacts.

We will explore these issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics and philosophy of AI together with distinguished keynote speakers including: Shannon Vallor (University of Edinburgh) Jocelyn Maclure (McGill University) Sebastian Gardner (University College London) Michael Clune (Case Western Reserve University) Fumi Okiji (University of California, Berkeley)

IPNH co-directors Markus Gabriel, Paul Kottman and Zed Adams will also present lectures.

The Forum Humanum scholarship will cover travel and accommodation costs, as well as provide a small stipend for daily expenses. Applicants must therefore confirm both that they are committed to traveling to New York in September and that they are fully vaccinated. Access to the New School campus without full vaccination is not permitted. 

To submit an application, please send a) an up-to-date CV and b) a brief statement outlining your interest in the event in light of your current research projects (max. 1 page), combined into a single document, by 29.02.2024 to Mr. Jan Voosholz (E-Mail: voosholz@uni-bonn.de)

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