Join the College of Liberal Arts Department of Philosophy and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching for a special virtual watch party featuring a session from the 2026 APA Pacific Division Meeting. This event will showcase the talk The AI Revolution in Education, presented by Duncan Pritchard (Distinguished Professor, UC Irvine), with invited commentary from Heather Battaly (University of Connecticut) and Nicole Garcia (MIT), followed by a Q&A. The session examines why AI presents a fundamentally different educational challenge than other technologies, focusing on its implications for intellectual character, cognitive agency, and how educators might respond. All Temple faculty and staff are welcome to register.

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ABSTRACT: While there is widespread agreement that the new AI technology will revolutionize education, the exact nature of why it will have such a dramatic effect is often left unclarified. It is argued that understanding the nature of the AI educational challenge requires us to recognize that the overarching epistemic goal of education is to cultivate intellectual character. Once we recognize this, we can then appreciate how AI poses a very different challenge to education than most other forms of technology. While one can normally effectively adapt educational practices to new technology, this is not possible in the case of AI due to how it has the potential to deprive students of the cognitive activities that educators use to cultivate intellectual character. We will be illustrating this point by considering the relevance of extended cognition in this respect. While the educational use of technology is normally compatible with extended cognition, this is not the case with AI, which undermines the intellectual skills associated with executive cognitive agency. With the AI educational challenge so understood, some interconnected strategies of response are proposed, such as introducing ‘cloistered’ periods of instruction where students are insulated from AI-based technologies, and explicitly teaching students the theory behind educating for intellectual character. 

Duncan Pritchard is UC Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology & Society at the University of California, Irvine. He was previously Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Eidyn interdisciplinary research center at the University of Edinburgh. His monographs include Epistemic Luck (Oxford UP, 2005), The Nature and Value of Knowledge (co-authored, Oxford UP, 2010), Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford UP, 2012), Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015), Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2019), Scepticism (co-authored, Routledge 2022), and Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty (co-authored, Cambridge UP, 2025). His latest monograph is Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life (Princeton UP, 2026). He is currently working on monographs on the value of truth and quasi-fideism for Wiley and Oxford University Press, respectively.