Prof. Dr.
Katja Krause

Many philosophical discussions of AI begin with its effects on our lives. They focus on our attention, our agency, our knowledge, and our social life. Katja Krause’s research begins earlier. She asks what must be in place for human judgment to form at all.

Krause is a philosopher and historian of science. She holds a visiting professorship in the Faculty of Computer Science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), is an affiliated Principal Investigator at the Lamarr Institute (TU Dortmund), holds a Chair for the History of Science at TU Berlin, and leads the Max Planck Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. From September 2026, she will serve as Founding Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and hold an Endowed Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome.

In her research, Krause develops the principle of relational rationality. Drawing on the history of philosophy and the sciences, she articulates the conditions under which human beings come fully into their own. Her claim is that human reason is less a faculty enclosed within the individual and more an ordered nexus of relations in which reason is formed and sustained. It takes shape in engagement with the reality of experience, in encounter with other persons, in orientation toward principles of the true and the good, and in a reflexive relation to self that makes judgment and therefore self-determination possible in the first place.

From this vantage point, she examines how generative AI unsettles those sustaining relations. It substitutes simulation for worldly contact, displaces the personal other with fabricated encounter, reroutes orientation through logics of optimization, and decouples self-relation by outsourcing reflection. What matters in her investigations is not how AI optimizes epistemic processes. What matters is whether it strengthens the relations that carry human reason, or whether it withdraws the experience, resistance, and answerability through which judgment comes to be.

This research finds institutional expression in the ENNOIA SYMPOSION: Being Human in the Age of AI – a four-year interdisciplinary program she founded and directs, sponsored by the kata agorein Foundation and co-hosted by the Department of Computer Science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Lamarr Institute at TU Dortmund. The Symposion brings together natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, AI researchers, and humanists to clarify what it means to be and to become human – a question no single discipline can settle on its own.

Within this shared work, Krause’s distinctive contribution is to develop the philosophical resources and academic forms of encounter through which the formation of human reason under conditions of AI can be consciously enabled and responsibly transmitted. She approaches the question not as a critic standing outside the field, but as a custodian of something we all depend on, and she extends an open invitation to those who shape these technologies to join in the inquiry – both as researchers and as people whose children will grow up inside the answers we give now.