Lehigh University Summer School · Religion, Culture & Society

RCS Seminar · Summer 2026 · Lehigh University

Course & schedule

REL 296 010 — Artificial Intelligence and the Making of Metaphysics — CRN 21576

Class Days Where Start End Type Instructor
REMOTE ONLY To be announced To be announced 05/26/2026 07/02/2026 Online course Dr. Christopher Driscoll (P)

AI and the Making of Metaphysics

A summer school course for the skeptically-minded, staking our human claim on the future in the age of AI.

What you will leave knowing

By the end, you will understand where HUMAN judgment, meaning, and craft sit when AI is everywhere and you will have created a real venture with a roster of AI agents you design and control.

We are living through a Value Crisis for the human. Never before have we been closer to capacities we once attributed only to God. And, never before have the activities we thought made us valuable (writing, analyzing, reasoning) been so thoroughly absorbed into machines.

Artists and creatives are feeling this pressure intimately: the push to become an “AI person,” the cheerleading that treats skepticism as a failure of vision. This course begins from a different place. We take AI seriously as a cultural and philosophical force, a powerful new presence reshaping the ground of creativity, value, and identity. Our work is not to celebrate it, but to understand the landscape it creates, and to find where we can stand with human integrity, human creativity, and human desire.

Where does the human sit when the tool is everywhere?

Join us for an ongoing experience in human meaning-making, judgment, and the metaphysics of craft, not a coding track.

This seminar answers that crisis in two modes at once.

Mode one · Academic metaphysics

We read projection theories of religion (Feuerbach, Freud), philosophies of technology (Arendt, Heidegger), and contemporary thought to ask how these models change the very form of what counts as “good” work, or human ownership. The line between tool and replacement isn’t just technical; it’s metaphysical; about the structure of our relationships to technology and to other humans.

AI is exhausting and threatening. That’s precisely WHY critical engagement is necessary.

Mode two · Venture studio

You will not write a final paper. Working solo or in a small group, you will create a real product or service to real users by the end of the summer. The metaphysics readings are guideposts so your venture does not turn into busy work; they teach what people actually buy, fear, and what “value” has meant so you can build something that matters.

By the end: a venture, a roster of agents that run it, a vocabulary to defend what you built, and a resume bullet that proves it.

You won’t be learning how to be an AI cheerleader. You’ll be leveraging tools to amplify your human goals, and creative projects. Do you just want to paint, and never think of business? Do you want to draw bridges and communities but hate coding huge chunks of interviews? Then lean into that discomfort with AI and come learn how to actually protect your artistic vision from it and use it to bring about the world you want to live in.

How the course works

Every part of the course couples a philosophical spine with a venture application, delivered as an Agent-Creation Assignment. You will build or configure an AI agent that performs a specific task for your venture, like a market researcher, a brand guardian, an ethics auditor.

What we will hold together

Expect arguments and texts that welcome doubt. We examine the uncomfortable reality of being a creator now, holding the tension between intuition and algorithmic suggestion. Your unique human voice becomes more precious when output is cheap: discernment, revision, and taste matter more than ever.

You don’t need to love the technology to need this map.

Who this Course is for

Please share with students who are curious but conflicted about AI, especially in creative fields. This course foregrounds the human position, the ethical and metaphysical stakes of knowledge and art, alongside technical reality. It is a dual response to the current value crisis: one half academic metaphysics, the other a hands-on venture studio where students ship a real product. It provides a disciplined space to explore what AI does well and poorly, requiring not a “pro-AI” identity, but a willingness to engage the difficult, dual reality it creates. It is for the student asking where, in this new landscape, their voice and judgment still sit.

Skeptical about AI but want to think clearly about art, ideas, and what stays human? Summer: AI and the Making of Metaphysics. A dual seminar: study the metaphysics of our human value crisis, then build and ship a real venture that you’re passionate about with AI agents.

You leave with