Machine Logos? Persons, Language, and AI

Bishop Paul Tighe was ordained a priest of the Dublin Diocese in 1983. After post-graduate studies in Rome, he lectured in theology and ethics in Dublin. In 2007, he was appointed as Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications at the Holy See. In 2015, he was nominated Bishop and assigned to the Pontifical Council for Culture. He currently serves as Secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on perception and consciousness, as well as art and the aesthetic. His most recent book is The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. He is currently working on love, AI, and pictoriality. Other writings include: Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (FSG, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (FSG, 2015); Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford, 2019); and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford, 2021).

Jeff Frank is a philosopher of education and professor and chair of the Education Department at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. His recent scholarship has focused on the educational implications of Hartmut Rosa’s thinking on resonance and religion, and he is working on several papers on the relationships between AI, moral formation, and Christianity.

Eileen C. Sweeney is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, writing mainly on Medieval philosophy, especially on questions of language, Medieval as well as 20th c. She also writes on the literary forms of philosophy and ancient and medieval notions of science. She is presently writing a history of philosophical theories of the passions from the Middle Ages through modernity.

Nic Fisk is a translational researcher in cancer evolution, but additionally studies productive failure and the process by which distinct disciplines with sui generis modes of knowledge production and expression nonetheless converge on similar educational strategies. Fisk’s philosophical interests center on epistemic responsibility, the nature of interdisciplinary inquiry, and practicalizing pluralism.

Jake Spinella is a PhD candidate in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He specializes in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of computing and artificial intelligence, and epistemology. His dissertation, The Belief-Independence of Perception, argues that perception is architecturally distinct from cognition in minds like ours and, furthermore, that this architectural distinctness has widespread ramifications for theorizing in the philosophy of mind, language, and epistemology.

Jacob Rump is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University (Omaha, USA) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow hosted at Paderborn University (Germany). His research lies at the intersection of the philosophy and ethics of AI, epistemology, and theories of meaning, language, and intentionality, with historical specialization in the phenomenological tradition (especially Husserl) and the history of analytic philosophy. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Meaning Without Language: A Phenomenological Account of Sense, Understanding and the Challenge of AI.

Stephen R. Grimm is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Fordham University in New York. His areas of specialization include epistemology, the thought of John Henry Newman, and the idea of philosophy as a way of life. He is Series Editor for the Oxford University Press line “Guides to the Good Life,” and the author of A Philosophy of the Humanities (OUP, 2025).

Ken Archer is a philosopher leading Responsible AI at Microsoft and a PhD researcher at Linköping University. He holds an MA in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America. His work draws on phenomenology and idealism to recover the cognitive grounding of scientific and technological reason and overcome the postwar divide between scientific-technological rationality and humanistic conceptions of meaning and life.

Fernando Nascimento is an Assistant Professor in Digital and Computational Studies at Bowdoin College in Maine, teaching courses on his main research areas: the ethics of digital technologies and hermeneutics. Among his writings, he is the author of Digital Poetics: A Ricoeurian Approach to Digital Technologies (2025) and co-author of Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live (2023).

Talbot Brewer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He specializes in ethics and political philosophy, with particular attention to moral psychology and Aristotelian ethics. He is the author of The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford, 2008). His essay “The Word Made Lifeless” was recently published in The Hedgehog Review.

William Hasselberger is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Political Studies (IEP) of the Catholic University of Portugal (UCP), and the Director of the Digital Ethics Laboratory (LED) at UCP, a center for advanced study and interdisciplinary research on emerging technologies and their impact on society. He is also vice-president for the UCP Research Ethics Commission for Technology, Social Sciences and the Humanities (CETCH). He is the author of numerous papers on AI, agency, and human relationships.

Taylor Nutter, PhD is an assistant professor in the department of theology at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD. He received his PhD in systematic theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2021, writing on modern and postmodern interpretations of St. Augustine. He is a member of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education's AI research group.

Oliver Wright is a Junior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University. After practicing as a lawyer in London for fifteen years, he trained for ordination in the Church of England, and in 2025 completed his doctorate combining the philosophy of language with modern doctrine. He has published widely in the field of philosophical theology, including on Kierkegaard, Agamben, Ricoeur, Rowan Williams, St Paul, and Prosper of Aquitaine’s “Lex orandi lex credendi.”

Fr. Matthew Dunch, S.J. is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Loyola. He has degrees from Loyola, The Catholic University of America, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the sensibility of religious language and its relationship to the exercise of practical reason within a community. He has also written on ethically informed mysticism. He is particularly interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Aquinas, and scholarship interrelating these two figures. His teaching includes courses in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of computation, and the history of analytic philosophy. He also developed service learning ethics courses centered on homelessness and outsider art.

Aarthi Venkat is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Co-mentored by Drs. Marinka Zitnik and Nir Hacohen, her work focuses on translating molecular and cellular insights into personalized patient interventions using geometric machine learning. Prior to her postdoctoral work, Aarthi completed her Ph.D. at Yale University with Dr. Smita Krishnaswamy, where she developed new methodology and collaborated across diverse disciplines toward an improved understanding of single-cell biology. Her work has appeared in journals such as Nature, Cancer Discovery, Genome Research, and Cell Patterns, as well as in computer science conferences such as ICASSP, LoG, and GSP.

Megan Angell is a private sector data scientist and independent AI ethics researcher. Her corporate expertise includes generative AI, interpretable machine learning, and AI ethics while her research focuses on the impacts of GenAI systems on users. She holds a master's in theology from the Pontifical Theological Faculty in Naples, Italy and a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Northwestern University, and she is currently finishing her ThM in Ethics at Boston College.

Micah Lott is Associate Professor in the department of philosophy at Boston College. He writes about ethics, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of technology.