UA Ruhr Science Symposium – Artificial Intelligence and the Philosophy of Perception
Supported by the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York, this symposium explores how humans and machines perceive the world.
Perception is not a passive recording of reality, but an active, interpretive process shaped by our knowledge, expectations, and biases. What we see is never just what is “out there” – it is filtered through the mind. Today, as artificial intelligence systems increasingly claim to “see” the world through computer vision, pressing questions emerge: Do machines perceive in any meaningful sense? What are the limits of human and artificial perception, and how do they differ?
Join Albert Newen (Ruhr University Bochum), a leading voice in contemporary philosophy of mind, together with Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers University) for a dialogue at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and AI. Together, they will explore how perception grounds our understanding of reality, and what it means when machines enter that domain.
Spanning from human perception (2020) to reconstructed nature of memory (2024) and now to machine “seeing” (2025), the UA Ruhr Science Symposium traces a compelling arc through philosophy and cognitive science. Guided throughout by Prof. Newen’s expertise, the series moves from the active mind’s interpretation of reality to the shaping of self through memory and finally to the challenges AI poses to our very understanding of what it means to perceive.
Albert Newen is Professor of Philosophy of Mind at Ruhr University Bochum and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution. His research focuses on philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language, with particular emphasis on social cognition, the self, perception, and emotion. Current projects address the dynamic relation between self and memory, new forms of social interaction with intelligent systems, and the situated nature of cognition in close dialogue with psychology and neuroscience. He is the author of The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (Oxford University Press, 2018, co-edited with Shaun Gallagher and Leon de Bruin), a landmark volume exploring embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive approaches to cognition. Newen’s international recognition is reflected in fellowships and visiting appointments at Oxford, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Urbana-Champaign, ZIF Bielefeld, and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg.Albert Newen, Professor of Philosophy of Mind at Ruhr University Bochum, Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution
Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University and a member of the Executive Council Faculty at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Her work bridges philosophy of mind, epistemology, AI, and neuroscience. Current projects, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, and a NEH Grant, include a book on the nature of perspectives in humans and AI with a special focus on reflexivity, and a series of papers on the neural basis of perception. She is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (Oxford, 2018), which develops a “capacities first” framework for understanding the role of perceptual experience.Susanna Schellenberg, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, Member of the Executive Council Faculty at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science
Event Information
October 17, 2025, 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017
Organizer(s): UA Ruhr, DWIH New York