Philosophical Aspects of Computer Sciences - Ethics, Norms & Responsibility

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Dr. Thomas Piecha received the teaching award of the board of studies at the Department of Computer Science, winter semester 2023/24.

Dr. Patrick Duerr has been invited to be a keynote speaker at this year's DPG (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft) conference. His talk will be on the topic of "Dark Energy as a Crisis of Underdetermined Pursuit-Worthiness."

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The primary focus of this workshop is the feeding back of insights learned from the pandemic to develop and promote sustainable research and teaching practices. This is a collaborative praxis, and draws on scholar’s own critical theorizing to (re)imagine the classrooms in which we teach. Foregrounding solidarity and care offer a rich interdisciplinary inroad, as matters of care and crisis are relevant to researchers and practitioners working across the sciences, engaged in matters of policy, and collaborating in community and activist initiatives. The workshop will support the development of a postgraduate summer school to work with students to theorise care and the research methods needed to address it across affective, social, and infrastructural ecologies. We do so to collaboratively address how global health crises provide a basis for political and ethical imagination and methodological innovation; in so doing, we position care and ethics as integral features of an emergent research agenda and methodology.

Participants:

Lauren Cubellis, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Thomas Stodulka, Freie Universität

Jessica Cooper, University of Edinburgh

Marta Perez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Marek Pawlak, Jagiellonian University in Krakow

A CIVIS course

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Proofs and arguments have been at the core of philosophy since the beginning. From the late 19th century onwards, the understanding of proofs and arguments has been strongly influenced by the development of modern mathematical logic and linguistics, while in recent times results in computer science have provided deep insights into the nature and structure of proofs and, thanks to the advancements in computational linguistics, of arguments in general. This exchange between philosophy, mathematics, linguistics and computer science has also led to a renewed approach to dialogues, in particular to the analysis of their context-depending nature and of their information-yielding structure.

In spite of the advancements in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics and computer science, the notions of proof, argument and dialogue still involve many unsolved issues. These issues refer to some fundamental questions such as: why and how do we get convinced by proofs, arguments and dialogues? What is the reliability of the information they convey? Is this reliability context-independent? What is the semantic import of proofs, arguments or dialogues? Co-operation between different disciplines seems to be inevitable for finding solutions to these questions, and such a cooperation has so far proved to be very fruitful. Many mathematised approaches to the study of proofs, arguments and dialogues are inspired by philosophical claims and strictly interlace with parallel investigations in linguistics and computer science. In turn, results in mathematical logic, linguistics and computer science are a continuous source of inspiration for many philosophical approaches.

The von Weizsäcker Zentrum and the Archives Henri Poincaré and LORIA (University of Lorraine at  Nancy) are organizing an interdisciplinary event "Where AI Ethics Should Go?" 
This event will take place at the University of Tübingen Thursday, June 30  and Friday, July 1 2022.
The  premise of the event is that the subfield of AI ethics has experienced an explosive expansion in the last couple years, and it is time to take a breather from this frantic rate of expansion to think about the consolidation of the subfield and the directions it should take.

We welcome 400 word abstract submissions from all disciplines, especially computer science, philosophy and the law addressing the following questions (*submission deadline April 15*):
    -what is currently missing in AI ethics?
    -which new directions should the field take?
    -what are the relations of AI ethics to other subfields, and how can we improve them?
    -Is  there a risk that AI ethics becomes too much of a world of its own, and casts old wine in new AI bottles?
    -what is and what should be our impact on institutions and the public sphere?
    -how can we teach AI ethics?
Requests for more information and abstracts can be sent to Maël Pégny

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a critical impact across all dimensions of social life. The struggles of life under lockdown, as well as drastic changes to work and care practices, have altered our understandings of what we know, and how we know it. Bringing together anthropologists from across Europe, this working group seeks to understand how we evaluate new forms of risk, and how enduring the persistent risk of the pandemic has shaped possibilities for research and interpersonal relationships. Drawing on the experiences in their respective countries, these scholars will examine debates around vaccination, the struggle to make sense of an onslaught of scientific and epidemiological data, and the ways in which work, care, and solidarity have both contributed and been responsive to these public debates. More broadly, they will consider what the temporality of the pandemic and the consequent limits to socialization have meant for anthropology, which as an investigative discipline is explicitly attuned to the rhythms and interactions of everyday life.