While typical AI user interfaces are designed to facilitate the illusion of a person-to-person interaction, the user is, of course, engaging with a vast ‘social’ network distributed across human, non-biological…

Please join us for a discussion of C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (Penguin 2026).Likes. Friend counts. Spotify Wrapped stats. As tech suffuses our lives, metrics…

Join us for an engaging evening of personal narratives and critical conversation as New School students share their experiences with ghosting — that modern phenomenon of abrupt disappearance in relationships,…

The internet (and AI) have made us acutely aware of the power of images, and how it can come to seem reasonable to want to destroy these images as a…

Modern knowledge-societies value intelligence as a set of problem-solving capacities. In recent years, we have entered a technology summer which draws on accelerated progress in AI research and the large-scale…

British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips aims to show the compatibility of psychoanalysis and American pragmatism. Pragmatism without psychoanalysis can seem naive, psychoanalysis without pragmatism can seem unduly coercive and essentialist. Adam Phillips is…

“There’s no arguing about art” is manifestly false. Art is one of the best things to argue about. The question is why. In this public philosophy debate, Nick Riggle (University…

The Philosophy Film Club and Liberal Studies present a screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) and discussion led by Robert Pippin (U Chicago). Generally considered one of Bresson’s greatest works, Pickpocket tells…

Artifacts are a primary object of study in the humanities. They are products and, thus, manifestations of human thought, action, and self-determination without which they cannot be understood. At the…

Practices of interpretation are central to both the humanities and social sciences, whose typical objects of interpretive activity range from artworks, texts and musical scores to rituals, economic behaviour and…

Symposium Overview    Over the past ten years, Robert Pippin has published a series of books on film that combine detailed readings of specific films and filmmakers with broader reflections on the…

This seminar will revisit our paradigms concerning objectivity in the humanities. To many, it seems as if the humanities provide us at best with less-than-objective knowledge claims. Arguably, there are…

For many of us, the past year has involved a turn inward, to our memories of a pre-pandemic past and whatever documents we have of that past. In this online…

This series of six lectures looks at the successes, as well as the failures, in the search of artificial intelligence and uses them as a window into the larger question…