About Us
Honors Faculty Lily Abadal
Ethics | Philosophy | Religious Studies
Dr. Lily Abadal is an educator and scholar of philosophy and religious studies. Her interests and research include the history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and applied ethics, particularly what is known as Neo-Aristotelian Ethics.
Scholarly Background and Interests
More specifically, Dr. Abadal has spent the last few years thinking deeply about the intersection of AI and virtue ethics. The through-line in all of her work is the question: "How do we form virtuous people in a culture of convenience?" This question has prompted her to write numerous pieces of public philosophy about the role of the university amidst AI disruption, the formative concerns surrounding chronic LLM use, the role of the essay in the modern university, and even on whether or not it is licit for preachers to use AI in writing homilies. Her answer is “no.”
Dr. Abadal has emerged as a thought leader in the AI & Education space and has a forthcoming book called The Virtues and Vices of Learning: Teaching as Resistance in a Culture of Convenience with the University of Oklahoma Press. She is currently serving as a non-residential fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, working on their AI Ethics initiative, the DELTA project.
Pedagogy
Dr. Abadal believes that the classroom is a space where students ought to actively exercise the skills that allow them to live well in community with others — those things necessary to cultivate both intellectual and moral virtue.
She designs her classroom to be a space where community is fostered among students, where active reflection is practiced and exercised, and where everyone is encouraged to show up, engage deeply, and wrestle with big ideas. For her, this means a focus on analog writing, small group dialogue, and slow inquiry. Publicly, this has become known as a “slow thinking pedagogy.” You can find out more about some of her classroom practices on the University of Notre Dame’s Designed for Learning podcast and read more of her thoughts on AI and education on her Substack, Wisdom in the Machine Age.
Because she is new to the Honors faculty team, she has hopes to teach seminars like …
Medieval Minds and Modern Machines: Technology and Human Formation, which focuses on how habits of speed, distraction, and convenience shape the human mind. It will contrast two “learning ecologies”: the monasteries of medieval Europe and the contemporary technology-saturated American West. The course will end in a week-long digital detox experience.
Tech Bros, Philosophers, and the Future of a Healthy Humanity will explore questions about human nature and its limits. It will put Aristotelian naturalism, posthumanism, and transhumanism in dialogue through exploring ancient texts, companies like Neuralink, and Claude Opus’s “Soul Document.” The ultimate question of the course is "are there any limits we should place on technological enhancement of the human person?"
Contact Dr. Lily Abadal.