AI and Philosophy

PROGRAM

April 16, 2026

Earl K. Long Library at The University of New Orleans

Download Complete Program with Abstracts

9:00-9:30 – Registration and Breakfast

9:30-11:00 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI Companions

Chair: Sara Bizarro

• 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?

9:30-11:00 – Library 416

AI, Aristotle, Kant, and Hobbes

Chair: Ben Aguda

• 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

9:30-11:00 – Library 431

Truth, Thinking, Personhood

Chair: Yunlong Cao,

• 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 

9:30-11:00 – Paper Workshop, Library 420

• Chelsea Schwartz, Trust and Authority in Clinical Diagnosis
• Finney Premkumar, A Principled Objection: Why Artificial Intelligence will never replicate Human Consciousness or Agency

11:10-12:40 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI vs Human

Chair: Jurgita Imbrasaite

• 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

11:10-12:40 – Library 416

AI Using LLMs

Chair: Sara Bizarro

• Benjamin Santos Genta, No AI Reproducibility? No Problem
• Mark Phelan & Mark Warren, Meta-Prompting for Metacognition

11:10-12:40 – Library 431

AI, Work and Free Speech

Chair: Ingrid Albrecht

• 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
• Mark Satta, Human Opinions and AI Viewpoints

11:10-12:40 – Paper Workshop, Library 418

• Triston Hanna, AI Psychosis—A Feature, not a Bug.
• Chen-Wei Wu, Sensory Transduction and the Individuation of Cognitive Systems

1:00-2:00 – LUNCH

2:00 – 2:30 – INVITED SPEAKER

• Eamon Duede, Epistemic Gaps and the Attribution of (AI) Discovery

2:30 – 3:15 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

• Susan Schneider, From Circuits to Sentience: Why Today’s Chatbots Are Not Conscious But Biological and Quantum Ais May Be
  
  

3:20 – 4:50 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI and Moral Behavior

Chair: Siobhain Lash

• 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

3:20 – 4:50 – Library 416

AI and Cognitive Science

Chair: Eric Sampson

• Zoe Drayson, AI and the role of abstraction in cognitive science
• Fuyao Zhang, Why Consciousness Cannot Be Detected by Algorithmic Criteria
• Ben Aguda and Fox Woodard, AI and Conditions for Consciousness

3:20 – 4:50 – Library 431

AI, Authorship and Creativity

Chair: Paul Schafer

• 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?

3:20 – 4:50 – Paper Workshop, Library 422

• 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?

5:00 – 6:30 – Dougie Hitt Conference Room, Library 407

AI and using LLM

Chair: Edward Johnson

• Joshua Yen, LLM-Simulated Tutorials in Philosophy Education
• Dimitria Gatzia & Moriah K. Wood, Developing Metacognition Through LLM-Enhanced Writing Assignments
• Greg Johnson, Why LLMs Can’t Think Like You.

5:00 – 6:30 – Library 416

AI and LLM: Parrots?

Chair: Jason Berntsen

• 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

5:00 – 6:30 – Library 431

AI and Philosophy of Mind

Chair: Mark Satta

• 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 

5:00 – 6:30 – Paper Workshop, Library 418

• William Watkins, The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Access Privacy
• Gregory Ashby, Simulated Recognition and Identity Formation
• Mitchell Roberts, “Just like a Calculator”: When is it Permissible to Offload to LLMs?,”