AI and Philosophy

PROGRAM

April 16, 2026

Earl K. Long Library at The University of New Orleans

8:00-8:30 – Registration

8:30-9:00 – Breakfast – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

Welcome Remarks

9:00-10:30  – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI Companions

• Ingrid Albrecht, Friends with Benefits? On Personal Relationships with Companion Chatbots
• Shannon Brick, Outsourcing Our Practical Reason: Artificial Intelligence and Interpersonal Relationships
• Lorenzo Manuali and Abdul Ansari, Can We Love AI Companions?

9:00-10:30  – Library 416

AI, Aristotle, Kant, and Hobbes

• Chong-Fuk Lau, Categories and Artificial Reasoning: From Aristotelian-Kantian Formalism to Hegelian Dynamic Holism
• Christopher Quintana, Technoamicitia: A Neo-Aristotelian Framework for User-Friendly Technologies
• Michael J. Ardoline, Submission and Technics: On the Two Political Imaginaries of AI in Western Philosophy

9:00-10:30 –  Library 431

Truth, Thinking, Personhood

• Daniel Calzadillas Rodriguez, Ashes to Ashes, Code to Code: Phenomenology on Death and the Personhood of A.I. 
• Trevor Griffith, Truth and The Proposition Machine
• Mark Walter, Thought’s Other: Artificial Intelligence and the Excess of Thinking 

9:00-10:30 – Paper Workshop, Room TBA

• Chelsea Schwartz, Philosophers Reflecting on AI
• Finney Premkumar, A Principled Objection: Why Artificial Intelligence will never replicate Human Consciousness or Agency
• Julian Lee-Sursin and Arnold Fleishman, Curb Your (Brain-Model Alignment) Enthusiasm

10:40-12:10 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI vs Human

• Eric Sampson, Creating Utility Monsters: A Dilemma for Humanity
• Ella Zhang, AI as the New ‘Other’ 
• Rotem Herrmann, AI vs Human: Time-Consciousness and Agency in Musical Improvisation

10:40-12:10 – Library 416

AI and Research and Free Speech

• Benjamin Santos Genta, No AI Reproducibility? No Problem
• Anna Pederneschi, Peer Review by AI
• Mark Satta, Human Opinions and AI Viewpoints

10:40-12:10 – Library 431

AI and Work

• Conny Knieling & Anthony Nguyen, The Moral Exploitation of Data Workers 
• Christopher Bousquet, Superhuman AI, Social Contribution, and Meaningful Work: Responding to the Threat of Technological Unemployment
• Siobhain Lash, Reconceptualizing Digital Privacy as Inalienable Property Rights

10:40-12:10 – Paper Workshop, Room TBA

• Mitchell Roberts, “Just like a Calculator”: When is it Permissible to Offload to LLMs?,
• Triston Hanna, AI Psychosis—A Feature, not a Bug.
• Chen-Wei Wu, Sensory Transduction and the Individuation of Cognitive Systems

12:10-12:50 – LUNCH

1:00-1:30 – INVITED SPEAKER

• Eamon Duede

1:30-3:00 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI and Moral Behavior

• Julianna Costanzo, Using AI to Promote Moral Behavior: The Trolley Problem and Meta Glasses
• Yan Zeng, Why Trustworthiness Cannot Be Engineered: A Structural Diagnosis of AI Trust
• Kelly Coble, Can Virtue Be Coded? Turing Machines and Moral Agency

1:30-3:00 – Library 416

AI and LLM: Parrots?

• Meredith McFadden, Large Language Models as Hybrid Epistemic Tools

• Mark Phelan, Speech Effects Without Intentions: Rethinking Meaning through Human-LLM Communication
• Mark Warren, Parrots in the Space of Reasons

1:30-3:00 – Library 431

AI, Authorship and Creativity

• Jason Swedene, AI, Authenticity, and Bad Faith: An Unexaggerated Report of the Author’s Death
• Jurgita Imbrasaite, What is an Author, ChatGPT?
• Jesse Hill, Can AIs be creative and is intention essential for creativity?

1:30-3:00 – Paper Workshop, Room TBA

• Jon Joey Telebrico, Epistemic Debt and Responsibility: Preserving Knowledge in an Age of LLMs
• Jonah Branding, Chomsky on cognitive trait individuation
• Simone Lee Quinn, Anonymous Algorithms, Real Power: What can Foucault tell us about our AI situation?

3:10-4:40 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI and using LLM

• Joshua Yen, LLM-Simulated Tutorials in Philosophy Education
• Dimitria Gatzia & Moriah K. Wood, Developing Metacognition Through LLM-Enhanced Writing Assignments

3:10-4:40 – Library 416

AI and Cognitive Science

• Zoe Drayson, AI and the role of abstraction in cognitive science
• Matthew Owen, (Meta)physical Factors for Covert Consciousness in Artificial Neural Networks and Organoid Intelligence: A Hylomorphic Perspective
• Fuyao Zhang, Why Consciousness Cannot Be Detected by Algorithmic Criteria

3:10-4:40 – Library 431

AI and Philosophy of Mind

• Louis Loock, How to Extract Your Cognition to an AI
• Daniel Bjorklund, Distinguishing between humans and AI on Two-tiered theories of intentionality
• Yunlong Cao, Understanding How It Works Defeats Mental Attribution 

3:10-4:40 – Paper Workshop, Room TBA

• William Watkins, The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Access Privacy
• Amani El-Sheikh, Daezhon Gilbarg, Jack Jacobs, Alex Lau, and Alexis Woods, The Interesting Gap in AI Companions for Older Adults or Amani El-Sheikh, Jack Jacobs, Alex Lau, and Alexis Woods, Griefbots and the Prudential Goods of Grief
• Gregory Ashby, Simulated Recognition and Identity Formation

5:00-6:00 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

• Susan Schneider