Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age
Housed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age supports study and research into the possibilities for human flourishing in contemporary society.
The activities of the Forum combine philosophical reflection on human nature and the human good with practical reflection on the possibilities for living well, and for designing tools that contribute to human flourishing, in a world shaped by digital technology.
These activities include:
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Regular offerings of Living Well Online, an undergraduate course that introduces students to philosophical reflection on human flourishing, with a focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by the pervasiveness of digital technology.
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Co-taught, cross-disciplinary seminars for graduate and advanced undergraduate students that explore topics within the focus of the Forum.
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An annual series of distinguished lectures on topics within the focus of the Forum.
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An outreach program, headed by a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and supported by select graduate and undergraduate fellows, for students in area high schools and middle schools.
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An annual summer seminar on topics in computer science and philosophy.
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A postdoctoral fellowship for a scholar who will teach and research in support of the Forum’s mission.
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Semester-long graduate fellowships for students in the Department of Philosophy who will conduct research on topics within the focus of the Forum. This program is generously supported by the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, with further support from the Department of Philosophy.
This program is generously supported by the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, with further support from the Department of Philosophy.
Speaker Series
March 11, 2025
John Durham Peters
John Durham Peters teaches and writes on media history and theory. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), with the late Kenneth Cmiel. He is working on a media history of weather.
March 25, 2025
Antón Barba-Kay
Antón Barba-Kay is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology. He is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University and Robert Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College. In addition to his scholarly publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy, his essays about culture and technology have appeared in The New Republic, The Hedgehog Review, and The Point, among other magazines. A Web of Our Own Making–his book about what the internet is and what a difference it makes–was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. He earned B.A.’s at St. John’s College and the University of Cambridge, as well as a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
April 8, 2025
Walter Scheirer
Walter Scheirer is the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research is primarily focused around the problem of recognition, including the representations and algorithms supporting solutions to it. He is particularly interested in features and learning-based methods that apply to both vision and language, thus breaking away from the persistent compartmentalization of recognition tasks. This has led to some interesting, and often unconventional approaches that can be applied to a broad set of areas including computer vision, machine learning, human biometrics, and the digital humanities. Specifically, his work is looking at open set recognition, extreme value theory models for visual recognition, biologically inspired learning algorithms, and stylometry.
April 16, 2025
Christine Rosen
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Concurrently she is a columnist for Commentary magazine and one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a senior editor in an advisory position at the New Atlantis.