Event Workshops
Discover the workshops offered during the Philosothon. The final workshop selection may depend on participant preferences and relevance to the chosen theme(s).
Design Philosophy: From Metaphysics to Material Reality
How do philosophical commitments manifest in technological design? This workshop explores the relationship between metaphysical positions and the creation of technologies, examining how designers' philosophical assumptions shape our technical environment.
Digital Commons and Information Capitalism
This workshop explores the political economy of information and knowledge in digital spaces. Drawing on theories from Ostrom to Marx, we'll examine how property, enclosure, and commons function in information economies.
Generative AI Art: Creativity, Authorship, and Aesthetics
Explore generative AI art tools hands-on while engaging with philosophical questions about creativity, authorship, and aesthetic value. What counts as art in an age when machines can generate images? Does AI-generated art challenge our understanding of artistic expression?
Language Models as Philosophical Objects
Explore large language models beyond their practical applications, focusing on their philosophical implications. How do LLMs challenge our understanding of knowledge, creativity, and meaning? What new philosophical questions emerge from these technologies?
Reinforcement Learning: The Technical Foundations of AGI
This workshop demystifies reinforcement learning technologies that underpin modern AI systems, providing philosophy students with technical grounding while exploring questions of creativity, agency, and intention in artificial systems.
Technology as Tool vs Master: Beyond Instrumentalism
Drawing on Heidegger, Feenberg, and other thinkers, this workshop examines competing frameworks for understanding our relationship with technology. Are we using technology, or is it using us? We'll explore instrumental, deterministic, and critical theories of technology.
The Attention Economy: Technical Mechanisms and Philosophical Implications
Explore the technical systems designed to capture, direct, and monetize attention, alongside philosophical reflections on consciousness, agency, and value in an attention-based economy.
Thinking Through Technical Systems: A Philosophical Approach
This workshop explores methodologies for critically examining the logic and values embedded in technical systems. Participants will learn frameworks for analyzing technologies as philosophical objects with their own ontologies and epistemologies.