What Can We Learn from Aquinas About AI? | Prof. Gyula Klima

The Thomistic Institute

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Gyula Klima uses Aquinas’ philosophy of mind to argue that human intelligence, rooted in immaterial universal concept formation, is metaphysically distinct from artificial general intelligence (AGI), though AGI can still serve as a powerful tool for enhancing human understanding and life.

This lecture was given on February 19th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

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About the Speaker:

Gyula Klima is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is the Founding Director of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics and of the Society for the European History of Ideas and Editor of their Proceedings. He is also an editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Editor-in-Chief of a book series at Springer, Historical-Analytical Studies in Mind, Nature, and Action, and at Fordham, Medieval Philosophy, Texts and Studies. Before taking up his position at Fordham, he had taught philosophy in the US at Yale and Notre Dame, prior to which he had done research in Europe at the universities of Budapest, Helsinki, St. Andrews, and Copenhagen. His publications, besides more than a hundred scholarly papers, include The Metaphysics and Theology of the Eucharist (Springer, 2024), Questions on the Soul by John Buridan and Others: A Companion to John Buridan’s Philosophy of Mind (Springer, 2017), Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2015), John Buridan (Oxford University Press, 2008), John Buridan: Summulae de Dialectica, an annotated translation with a philosophical introduction; (Yale University Press, 2001); ARS ARTIUM: Essays in Philosophical Semantics, Medieval and Modern (Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1988).

Keywords: Artificial General Intelligence, Human Intelligence, Immaterial Intellect, Metaphysical Limits, Philosophy of Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Sensory vs. Intellectual Representation, Thomistic Anthropology, Universal Concept Formation

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.6	visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:24.6	The metaphysical limits of artificial,
0:26.6	general intelligence by the lights of Aquinas,
0:28.6	philosophy of mind.
0:30.6	Now, before I will really start,
0:33.6	the lecture itself, I should point out,
0:36.6	that this is just somewhat condensed
0:39.9	lecture form based on a paper that is about to be published and the paper is
0:48.0	about to be published and the paper is in turn based on an earlier lecture and the conference
0:57.6	volume of which will contain the expanded paper itself. I will make the paper available
1:04.0	for anybody interested after the lecture if there will be anyone still interested in the subject.
1:11.2	Okay.
1:13.2	So thank you very much.
1:15.1	Let me get started.
1:15.8	Okay.
1:25.6	So one would not expect Aquinas to have much to say about artificial intelligence, AI.
1:32.3	But it does have a lot of profound things to say about human intelligence. So we may be well advised to heed what he says about human intelligence
1:39.3	against the background of all the contemporary hype about artificial intelligence. This lecture will argue
	...

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