What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for the future of the humanities? As generative and increasingly agentic AI systems generate human-like language, they also raise debates about how human beings and their relation to the world are to be understood.

In two keynote talks, Prof. Markus Gabriel (Bonn) and Prof. Yasuo Deguchi (Kyoto) will present their visions for a „reconception of the human sciences“. Their contributions are situated in the context of the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities (IPNH), an international and interdisciplinary initiative bringing together researchers in Bonn, New York, and Kyoto. At its core is the question of how the humanities might respond constructively to the transformations associated with AI and, more broadly, how their conceptual foundations and methods may need to be reconsidered. 

One issue in this discussion is the observation that generative AI is already able to produce complex, human-like affective responses that users may interpret as expressions of empathy and emotional responsiveness. This suggests a new form of the “uncanny valley”: what becomes uncomfortable is not simply that machines resemble humans, but that familiar markers of human interaction no longer provide a reliable boundary between human expression and technological simulation.

The two speakers take these developments as a case to reconsider some of the conceptual distinctions through which the humanities have tried to understand human beings and their relation to the world, e.g. in terms of the classical dualities between human and machine, mind and matter, reason and emotion.