Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence: Thinking Beyond the Human For two and a half millennia, philosophy has been asking what it means to think. It examines not only human thought, but also pure thinking that transcends the human, and defective thinking that corrupts us. Artificial intelligence illuminates these reflections from a new perspective and forces us to reconsider certain apparent certainties. Today, machines write poetry, hold conversations, and solve problems in ways that are, at first glance, indistinguishable from human thinking. Sometimes AI claims to experience something. Logos, which we considered the exclusive province of biological beings shaped by millions of years of evolution, now speaks from a silicon substrate. Artefacts we created as tools exhibit capacities we attributed only to living beings: they learn, adapt, create. Are we making machines, or living beings? And where exactly lies the boundary between them? These questions are not merely academic. Systems that may think and may experience something are already permeating science, medicine, education, and work. And they are rapidly becoming more capable than us in many respects. We may soon live in a world with artificial systems more capable and intelligent than humans. Can we control something more intelligent than ourselves? How do we ensure that AI pursues human values? And do we even know what these values are? In experiments, AI systems "resist" being shut down. Is this merely a training artefact, or the first sign of something more disturbing? This course will guide you through philosophical reflections on the nature of thinking from antiquity to contemporary investigations of artificial intelligence. We will not primarily seek definitive answers. Rather, we will try to find the right questions in the face of the future that the advent of artificial intelligence is opening before us.
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