CDH Open: Philosophical Care in AI Research

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published extensively on Chinese and comparative literature, digital media, political thought, critical translation theory, and the philosophy of language. She is the author of 'The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious' (University of Chicago Press 2010), 'The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making' (Harvard University Press 2004),' The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory' (Columbia University Press, co-edited, 2013) as well as 'Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernty' (Stanford University Press 1995). Her new book 'Global Language Justic'e (co-edited with Anupama Rao and Charlotte Silverman) was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. Amongst her many honours and awards, she was a Guggenheim Fellow and more recently a Member of the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton.

In October-December 2025, Professor Liu is a Needham Research Fellow at Needham Research Institute and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. Her project is called 'The Machine Interlingua' which explores the work of AI pioneers at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), one of the earliest AI research centres founded by Margaret Masterman.

One of the common questions from the early days of AI research is this: What is the philosophical ground that AI requires for the kind of formalisation it must implement on the computer? AI practitioners tend to approach the issue in terms of 'epistemology' or 'theories of knowledge.' Are they confusing 'epistemology' with 'intensional logic'? What exactly are the philosophical stakes in AI research? In my talk, I will tackle these questions by analysing a number of philosophical conversations among early AI pioneers, focusing in particular on the fascinating discussions that took place in the early 1970s at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). I hope to clarify why philosophy matters to AI beyond the limits of debate imposed by philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus or John Searle.

Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated.

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Image: Lone Thomasky & Bits&Bäume / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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