Research Themes

Research Themes

At PAIR, we work on philosophical issues that relate to AI. Among these, we try to identify the most important and the most interesting ones. We do philosophy (rather than philosophically inspired work in related areas), and we think that normative/ethical and theoretical issues are intertwined. Perhaps these questions can be summarised as: What is AI? What could AI be? What should AI be? (Müller 2025, 42).

Theoretical issues include: Intelligence, artificiality, computation, perception & action, meaning & representation, rational choice, free will & creativity, consciousness, normativity, and philosophical method (see Müller 2025).

Ethical issues include: Privacy & data protection, human autonomy & manipulation, opacity & explainability, fairness & bias, human-machine interaction, autonomous AI systems, moral status & responsibility, superintelligence & existential risk, political ethics, AI policy (see Müller 2020/2026) (see also Nyholm/Kasirzadeh/Zerilli, eds. 2026)

For details, see the research under people, and the activities on http://sophia.de/research.htm.

At the moment (late 2025), we think that some fruitful items may include: agency, intention, perception, limits of machine-learning, AI in education & research, AI and philosophical method, well-being, and human rights.