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Interdisciplinary conference at the Department of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the
University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN)
November 19–21, 2026

Starting point and objective
The concept of intelligence is one of the central points of reference in scientific,
technological, and social debates today. In psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, it
is usually understood in functional, operational, and empirical terms. At the same time, the
rapid development of artificial intelligence has reignited the question of the relationship
between human and machine intelligence.
These discussions are conducted almost exclusively on the basis of modern Western concepts
of intelligence. This also has to do with the conceptual traditions in many historical
humanities. These rarely refer explicitly to "intelligence," but rather use terms such as
knowledge, reason, insight, judgment, prudence, wisdom, imagination, or spiritual forms of
knowledge.
This is precisely where the conference comes in. From a historical and cross-cultural
perspective, it asks how human cognition and judgment have been understood, described, and
evaluated in different eras and cultures—and what these historical concepts can contribute to
today's debates on intelligence.

Key questions
The conference puts forward the thesis for discussion that what can be described as
intelligence is not something that is given, but something that differs and develops historically
and culturally. This gives rise to the following key questions for the conference:

• What terms, metaphors, and concepts existed in different cultures for what we today
collectively call "intelligence"?
• What forms of cognition, imagination, judgment, and other mental faculties were
central, and how were they related to each other?
• What role did emotions, affects, physicality, moral dispositions, or spiritual
dimensions play in cognition and insight?
• Why were cognitive and emotional abilities related to each other differently in many
historical contexts than in modern Western concepts?
• How do basic anthropological assumptions differ between different cultures and
epochs (e.g., about the soul, spirit, heart, breath, qi, nous, ʿaql, etc.)?
• What normative expectations were associated with cognitive abilities (e.g., wisdom,
virtue, governance, religious authority)?
A particular focus is on the alterity of pre-modern and non-European concepts that challenge
common modern models of intelligence or contribute to their historicization.
Contributions are welcome from the following fields, among others:
• Ancient China: concepts of zhi (智), xin (心), li (理), knowledge, insight, and moral
judgment in Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.
• Pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arab world: meanings of ʿaql, qalb, poetic knowledge,
wisdom, and inspiration.
• Classical antiquity: nous, logos, dianoia, phronesis, phantasia, sophia, ratio,
prudentia, sapientia, intellectus, imaginatio, and the relationship between knowledge,
emotion, and virtue in Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophical schools, late antique
Platonism, and Aristotelianism
• Ancient Orient and Egypt: wisdom literature, heart (ib), calligraphy, divine
inspiration, and administrative knowledge.
• Medieval traditions (Latin, Byzantine, Arabic, Islamic, Jewish): faculties of the soul,
doctrines of the intellect, imagination, prophecy.
• Early modern period: Transformations of concepts of knowledge in the context of
rationalism, empiricism, and the socalled scientific revolution.

Contexts
A central concern of the conference is to discuss historical perspectives not in isolation, but in
dialogue with current debates. The University of Technology Nuremberg, with its focus on
"Human and Artificial Intelligence," offers an ideal setting for this.
The conference focuses on pre-modern approaches to intelligence, but also places them in the
context of current questions and challenges in the relationship between human intelligence
and artificial intelligence:
• How can historical concepts of cognition and judgment correct, expand, or relativize
contemporary ideas of human intelligence?
• What implicit ideas about humans and their cognitive abilities underlie current AI
models – and how do they appear against the backdrop of historical anthropological
and epistemological concepts?
• What is understood as genuinely human in historical concepts, and what does this
mean for the distinction (or relationship) between human and artificial intelligence?
• Can pre-modern, integrative models of cognition open up new ways of thinking about
how we deal with AI?

Format and structure
The following are planned:
• Plenary lectures with historically focused contributions,
• Afternoon workshop formats with presentations by doctoral students and postdocs,
• A public evening lecture, and
• a concluding roundtable discussion on the question:
"What perspectives does intelligence research offer for the pre-modern humanities?"

Target audience
The conference is aimed at scholars from the fields of pre-modern philology, literary and
cultural studies, the history of philosophy, science, and religion, and related areas.

Contributions from scholars in the early stages of their careers are welcome.

Call for Papers
We invite submissions of papers.
For the plenary lectures, we are looking for contributions that raise central questions about the
understanding of human intelligence from a historical or cross-cultural perspective and
stimulate interdisciplinary discussion. The plenary lectures are scheduled to last 30 minutes
with 15 minutes for discussion.
For the afternoon workshops, we particularly invite early-career scholars (doctoral candidates
and postdocs) to present their ongoing work or conceptual considerations in short
presentations of 15–20 minutes. We welcome philological or cultural-historical text analysis
or comparative contributions that focus on historical concepts of cognition and mental
faculties.
Abstracts (approx. 300 words) should outline the research question, context, and approach.
In addition to purely historical contributions, we also welcome submissions that open up a
dialogue between historical perspectives and current debates on human and artificial
intelligence.
Please send abstracts with a short CV by April 1, 2026, to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein.

Prof. Dr. Gyburg Uhlmann

Founding Chair

Department of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and Full Professor of Classics with Special Focus on Greek Studies

University of Technology Nuremberg

Technische Universität Nürnberg

 Phone +49 911 9274 – 0

https://www.utn.de

 November 18-20, 2026, Potsdam, Germany

Important dates:
Submission: April 1, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2026
Conference: November 18–20, 2026

URL: https://sites.google.com/view/mire26/home

Abstracts should be sent via email to: Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein.

-- CALL FOR PAPERS --

As one of the dominant languages of the Roman Empire, Greek Koiné continues to play a very important role during the Roman period and shows a big deal of diatopic and diastratal (social and political) variation. One such example is Atticism: the classical language came to be considered as “the ideal variety” as opposed to the administrative Koiné that is dissociated from any literary tradition (inter alia, Swain 1996; Schmitz 1997; Silk 2009; Strobel 2009; Rafiyenko & Seržant 2022). Imitating the classical language produced a new literary register referred to as Learned Language, which combines authentic usage with hypercorrect lexical choices and patterns and inevitably shows some effects of Koiné (inter alia, Strobel 2009; Benedetti 2020; García Ramón 2020; Rafiyenko & Seržant 2020). At the same time, Greek (and Latin) coexisted with numerous other more or less local languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic etc. While some of them appear to have become extinct during the Roman imperial times (Etruscan is attested as being spoken for the last time in the 2nd century CE), others not only remained vital, but reacquired more visibility and their own literary tradition in Late Antiquity, and became a crucial facet in the expression of specific regional and religious identities.

More generally, the use of language – and specifically, of concrete varieties – is a performative act of enormous relevance in expressing, shaping and reinforcing identity, as well as in claiming belonging or affiliation to specific groups, as sociolinguistic studies (for example, on phenomena such as crossing) have demonstrated. 

The goal of this conference is to bring together scholars working on different cultural and linguistic aspects of the multilingual society of the Roman Empire, in order to investigate how the Greek language, in its interaction with the other languages written and spoken within the Roman Empire, was deployed and performed as part of a complex cultural discourse and was entangled in the construction of imperial segmentary identities. 

We encourage submissions addressing (but not limited to) the following questions: 
- The social, historical and cultural environment that potentially may have constrained the language of that period; influence of other languages and the way interaction with other languages was organized
- How native and second-language speakers of Greek index their identities in their linguistic production with respect to both grammar and lexicon, for example when accommodating effects of Atticism (cf. Rafiyenko & Seržant 2022); effects of Learned Language (Strobel 2009); effects of local and regional varieties on the standard (García Ramón 2020)
- Effects of multilingualism on Greek as the source or target language;
- The role played by translations to and from Greek within the multilingual context of the multicultural society of the Roman imperium
- The role(s) played by switching and crossing languages in performing identities and claiming belonging within the multilingual and multicultural society of the Roman empire – both in written texts and in oral performances?
- How may methods from Digital Humanities contribute to the questions addressed in the workshop?
- We encourage corpus-based and quantitative approaches to the questions posed above.

References

Benedetti, M., 2020. The perfect paradigm in Theodosius’ Κανόνες: diathetically indifferent and diathetically non-indifferent forms. In: D. Rafiyenko and I.A. Seržant, eds. Contemporary Approaches to Postclassical Greek. Trends in Linguistics series. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 205‑220.
García Ramón, J.L., 2020. Grammatical and lexical structures on change in Postclassical Greek: local dialects and supradialectal tendencies. In: D. Rafiyenko and I.A. Seržant, eds. Contemporary Approaches to Postclassical Greek. Trends in Linguistics series. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 303‑336.
Rafiyenko, D. & Seržant, I.A., 2020. Postclassical Greek. An overview. In: D. Rafiyenko and I.A. Seržant, eds. Contemporary Approaches to Postclassical Greek. Trends in Linguistics series. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1‑18.
Seržant, I.A. & Rafiyenko, D., 2021. Diachronic evidence against the source-oriented explanation in typology. Evolution of Prepositional Phrases in Ancient Greek. Language Dynamics and Change, 11 (2), 167‑210.
Schmitz, T., 1997. Bildung und Macht. Zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der Zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Munich: Beck.
Silk, M., 2009. The Invention of Greek: Macedonians, Poets and Others. In: A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk, eds. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London Publications 12. Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 3‑31.
Strobel, C., 2009. The Lexica of the Second Sophistic: Safeguarding Atticism. In: A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk, eds. Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present. Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London Publications 12. Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 93‑108.
Swain, S., 1996. Hellenism and empire : language, classicism, and power in the Greek world, AD 50-250. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies offers a number of postdoctoral Visiting Fellowships each academic year. Each Visiting Fellow is appointed for a maximum of one academic term and receives access to the University of Cambridge library system for the duration of their fellowship.

Purpose of the Fellowships

The purpose of the fellowship program is to encourage and support research of the highest quality in the field of Greek Studies. This field covers the languages, cultures and history of the people of the Greek peninsula and their near neighbours or diaspora from the 2nd millennium BCE to the present, or of the reception of the above in an adjacent field in the humanities including, but not restricted to, history, education, literary criticism, divinity, law, and architecture. It also covers comparative scholarship involving Greek Studies.
The fellowships are of 4 to 10 weeks duration and are intended to help diverse scholars from around the world share ideas and forge new partnerships in a vibrant, cross-disciplinary context. The Centre particularly encourages innovative scholarship in the broad field of Greek studies, via fresh diachronic, synchronic, comparative, methodological or theoretical perspectives.

The terms of the appointments provide for financial support including:

  *   £300 per week (7 days), or part week, for a maximum of ten weeks;
  *   travel costs (including ground transport.)

Application Deadline: 31st January 2026

https://www.ccgs.csah.cam.ac.uk/lewis-gibson-visiting-fellowships-0