Computational Analysis for Philosophical Education: A Case Study in AI Ethics

This paper explores what computational methodologies can tell us about philosophical education, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics. Taking the readings on our AI ethics and responsible AI syllabi as a corpus of AI ethics literature, we conduct an analysis of the content of these courses through a variety of methods: word frequency analysis, term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) scoring, document vectorization via SciBERT, clustering via k-means, and topic modelling using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We reflect on the findings of these analyses, and more broadly on what computational approaches can offer to the practice of philosophical education. Finally, we compare our approach to previous computational approaches in philosophy, and more broadly in the digital humanities. This project offers a proof of concept for how contemporary natural-language processing techniques can be used to support philosophical pedagogy: not only to reflect critically on what we teach, but to discover new materials, explore conceptual gaps, and make our courses more accessible to students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds.