Teaching

Ehud Lamm
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Graduate seminar
This seminar is dedicated to using ideas and tools from philosophy of science and philosophy of mind to think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. The seminar begins with a quick overview of debates about classic, symbolic AI ("Good Old fashioned AI", GOFAI). The seminar then proceeds to a focused discussion of issues stemming from current approaches to AI and machine learning. These include: explanations for deep learning's success; the debate between symbolic and deep learning proponents ("rationalists" and "empiricists"); innateness; causal learning; concept formation; and normativity. We also discuss social bias in machine learning and whether it can be mitigated. The seminar includes practical, hands on, programming exercises.

Ehud Lamm
Philosophers Writing on Technology and the Future
Graduate seminar
What constitutes insightful philosophical engagement with new and upcoming technology? The seminar is dedicated to reading work by philosophers who engage with concerns arising from new technologies, and debating whether their work manages to identify the truly philosophically interesting aspects of them. Among the topics we discuss: robot ethics, anti-aging, the singularity, are we living in a computer simulation?, cryptocurrencies, privacy, fake news etc.

Nir Evron
Consciousness in Prose Fiction: Human, Animal, Machine
Graduate seminar
The course explores how literary texts represent consciousness, tracing the changing forms and conventions through which writers have rendered thought, perception, memory, emotion, and self-awareness. It focuses both on the development of techniques for representing interiority in human, animal and artificial minds. While the course draws primarily on the conceptual resources of narratology and literary history, it also engages work in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. Its aim is not to determine what consciousness “really” is, but to examine how different historical periods and literary forms have imagined and represented it. The course’s final section centers on contemporary debates about the possibility of conscious AI agents.

Carmel Vaisman
AI as a Cultural Phenomenon
undergraduate seminar
Artificial intelligence represents revolutionary science and the engine of new media, but the cultural concept of AI long predated its technology. The main challenges that AI poses today were already exhausted by ancient philosophical debates, and even the newest among them have already been encountered in issues related to the internet in general, and critical thinking about algorithms in particular. The seminar positions the phenomenon of artificial intelligence within its broader cultural and historical context, reviews the primary scholarly approaches and issues for analyzing the phenomenon from a humanities perspective, and equips students with the ability to critique the use of AI through precedents relevant to the topics that interest them.

Carmel Vaisman
The Maggid and the Golem: Artificial Intelligence from a Religious and Philosophical Perspective
Graduate course, Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies
In this course, we discuss the primary philosophical and social issues arising from artificial intelligence technologies from a Jewish religious perspective. We examine questions such as whether artificial intelligence can possess consciousness, in which contexts it is appropriate to grant it autonomy, to what extent responsibility can be attributed to it, whether it is desirable for it replace us at work, and what kind of relationship should be established with it from a religious standpoint - alongside traditional Jewish sources and in comparison to other religious or philosophical approaches in academic literature.

Nana Ariel
What is a Poem in the Age of the Machine? (מַזֶשִּׁיר בעידן המכשיר)
Undergraduate Course
Recently, artificial intelligence and text generators have sparked lively debate about the future of writing. Are we witnessing the end of the age of original writing? In fact, thinking about the limits of originality is nothing new. Innovative cultural and literary movements throughout the twentieth century already challenged the assumption that writing must be original, experimenting with "algorithmic" writing long before the digital age. In this course, we will discuss the concept of originality in Western culture, ask whether writing must be original to be valuable, examine the impact of technological change on literature, and explore these questions through reading and writing. Throughout the course, we encounter a range of "unoriginal geniuses," to use Marjorie Perloff’s term. We explore cultural movements and trends such as Oulipo, the contemporary movement of "uncreative writing," particularly in Hebrew, David Avidan’s experiments, and the emerging global movement of writing with artificial intelligence. We examine researchers’ and cultural figures’ fantasies and nightmares about automatic writing and reflect on the future of writing in the information age. Course website>>

Nana Ariel
Machine Talk: What AI Reveals about Conversation
Block Undergraduate and Graduate Seminar
People mostly meet AI by talking to it, and talking to a chatbot involves far more than writing a good prompt. Conversations with AI range from exchanges for practical assistance to companionship, therapy, and literary experimentation. This seminar explores conversation as a rhetorical genre, with its own structures, sub-genres, conventions, and clichés, and asks how AI draws on that genre and reshapes it, borrowing the cues of human talk while developing patterns of its own. We trace the historical roots of conversational AI and follow them into contemporary chatbots. Reading conversation theory and philosophy alongside literary works, we explore dialogues with machines, attentive to aspects such as turn-taking, misunderstanding, and repair. We treat conversation as the constant management of potential breakdown, where moments of failure are often most revealing. In hands-on sessions, we assess different forms of machine dialogue and ask what these exchanges reveal about how conversation works and how they might help shape more reflective interactions with machines.
At the RhetAI Center, University of Tübingen  

Monica Broido

Communicating Science in the AI Era: Writing and Speaking for PhD Researchers
Workshop

This course introduces doctoral students to the conventions of academic and scientific writing, with the aim of helping them present complex research clearly, effectively, and efficiently for publication. Students receive individual feedback from the instructor and peer review one another's drafts. The course also examines the use of current AI tools at every stage of the writing and the research process as a whole, including specialised applications for tasks such as conducting a literature review, as well as custom agents that students can build to assist with research and with organising their work, while considering the benefits and the limitations of these tools. By the end of the course, students are expected to communicate their research with greater clarity and confidence in both written and oral form. This is a one-semester course consisting of a weekly two-hour session (academic hours) and individual meetings with the instructor.