How can we live well in a world where digital technology is pervasive? In 2025, Professor John Schwenkler and the University of Illinois Department of Philosophy are launching the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age to explore how humans can thrive with digital technology, instead of letting our well-being be undermined by it.
The Forum will combine theoretical reflection on human nature and the human good with practical reflection on the possibilities for living well. It will also explore how to design digital tools that contribute to human flourishing. The Forum will be housed in the Department of Philosophy and is generously supported by the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE), who approached Schwenkler to create the program. The Forum will join other programs supported by FEHE at elite universities including Harvard, Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University.
“In time, I expect [the Forum] will position us at the cutting edge of these conversations, drawing on the university’s strengths in technical and humanistic fields to help us lead the way in understanding how human beings can thrive in a world of digital technology and shape that technology so that it aids our flourishing rather than undermining it,” Schwenkler said.
Activities will begin in March with a public lecture series that will feature John Durham Peters, Antón Barba-Kay, Christine Rosen, and Paul Scherz as the first speakers. Several of the speakers have recently published books that relate to the subject of the Forum.
“Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World explores how the ‘mediated’ character of digital life transforms the way we understand ourselves and our world. In The Ethics of Precision Medicine, Paul Scherz reflects on the ethical challenges raised by the emerging field of precision medicine, which uses AI and genetic technologies to identify risk factors as a means of preventing future disease. And Antón Barba-Kay’s book, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, is one of the deepest and most provocative books I have read about the social effects of the internet age. Finally, John Durham Peters was recommended by my U of I colleague Alexandre Gonçalves as an important scholar of digital media. I’m honored and excited to have them kicking off the first year of our activities,” said Schwenkler..
Community engagement is a key focus of the Forum, and Schwenkler hopes events will attract an audience from the local community as well as from campus. In the fall of 2025, the Forum will also launch an outreach program for students in area high schools and middle schools, led by faculty in the Department of Philosophy.
“I hope [the Forum] will be a place where faculty, students, and staff at Illinois, as well as members of the surrounding community, can come together to discuss what are really some of the most important moral and political challenges of the present day,” said Schwenkler.
Schwenkler is also developing and piloting Living Well Online, a new 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.
Additional curriculum activities of the Forum include cross-disciplinary seminars for graduate and advanced undergraduate students that explore topics within the focus of the Forum and an annual summer seminar on topics in computer science and philosophy. They will also support a postdoctoral fellowship for a scholar who will teach and research in support of the Forum’s mission, and graduate fellowships for students in the Department of Philosophy who will conduct research on topics within the focus of the Forum.
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