Fall 2025

The shift of the basis of public life from slow and centralized print and audiovisual media to faster, ubiquitous, distributed, user-generated short-form word and video material has been widely noted.  I want to ask what the new mode of incessant documentation of raw behavior means for the possibility of both forgiveness and the collective learning process essential to public deliberation.  If every word or deed is frozen in its first draft, what then?  Some consequences are the once ubiquitous genre of the “statement” as apparently trustworthy speech, the recoding of common knowledge as corrosive secrets whose exposure is worried to have damaging effects, and an obsessive public hermeneutics of small nonverbal gestures at the expense of speech.  Is a reformist or redemptive rethink of this communication infrastructure possible or are we stuck?  What are the morally distorting effects of omnipresent surveillance?  This talk might not answer that question, but it will tease it in many ways.   

John Durham Peters is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale. He teaches and writes on media history and theory. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel. He is working on a media history of weather.

Are we building God? In an era where artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of the Internet age renders the realm of information more present — and real-feeling — than the physical one, how do we understand ourselves theologically? And, no less importantly, how do we understand our relationship to reality? This talk will explore contemporary transhumanism — from human self-transcendence to the rise of artificial intelligence — as a specifically theological phenomenon, one rooted in the symbol set, rhetoric, and sacralization of the human found in the Western esoteric tradition. Often considered under the catch-all term “magic,” or “learned magic,” these schools of thought — rooted in late antique Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, and frequently revived by scientists and humanists from Marsilio Ficino to Isaac Newton — stress the necessity of human beings using gnosis to become Gods and perhaps even transcend their creature. This lecture will show the perennial influence of these ideas at various stages of what we now think of as “modernity”, as well as their impact, in particular, on the twentieth-century counterculture that gave rise to the Internet.

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, and the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon.

From predictive algorithms to ambient notetaking, generative replies to patients, and more, artificial intelligence (AI) is already influencing medicine.  How should we approach this radical transformation?  Drawing on insights from medical practice, philosophy, and the social sciences (including ongoing research studies on AI-based prognostication and patient-facing chatbots), this talk will argue that AI is more than a “tool we use.” It has the potential to change who we are, and what we value.  In response, ethical principles alone are not enough; instead, cultivating virtues in this new AI age will be critical to addressing issues of transparency, explainability, algorithmic bias, and more.  

Matthew DeCamp, MD, PhD, is a practicing internist, philosopher and social scientist whose research on ethics and artificial intelligence bridges the gaps between ethics, medicine, and health policy.