Immanence and Transcendence in the AI Classroom

​Drawing from the writings of Simone Weil, this talk will argue that education, properly conceived, depends on a cultivation of the soul, which occurs with three forms of encounter:

​(1) Embodied encounters with the physical world. (2) Metaxic encounters with the transcendent. (3) Intersubjective encounters with the Other.

​While Large Language Models (LLMs) have many usefully affordances, they are intrinsically opposed to all three forms of encounter and thus an impediment to true education, which must play out between conscious human beings and, Weil argues, between human beings and God. The talk will make this case with examples from mathematics, continental philosophy, and educational history in Europe and North America.

​About Campbell Scribner

​Campbell Scribner is a scholar of educational policy, history, and philosophy. Although his work covers a broad chronological range, all of it centers on conflicting notions of democracy in American schools. His first book, The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines the legal and political controversies around school district boundaries, which present difficult choices between local participation and equal educational opportunity. Other projects include studies the history of school discipline, the history and philosophy of student boredom, and the contested meanings of school vandalism.

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