After Leibniz...: discussions on philosophy and artificial intelligence.

This is an edited transcript of informal conversations which we have had over recent months, in which we looked at some of the issues which seem to arise when artificial intelligence and philosophy meet. Our aim was to see what might be some of the fundamental principles of attempts to build intelligent machines. The major topics covered are the relationship of AI and philosophy and what help they might be to each other: the mechanisms of natural inference and deduction; the question of what kind of theory of meaning would be involved in a successful natural language understanding program, and the nature of models in AI research.