“The corporate takeover of language and thought will only succeed if academics and students allow it.” Edinburgh Philosophy telling it like it is #philsky #ai

“The corporate takeover of language and thought will only succeed if academics and students allow it.” Edinburgh Philosophy telling it like it is #philsky #ai

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2

“investigation had found that AI services gave voters misinformation to 34% of the questions it posed … invented fictitious scandals, gave the wrong date for the election, claimed wrongly that voters in Scottish elections needed ID at polling stations and placed candidates in the wrong contests.”

I enjoyed two years in the Philosophy department at UH and had stellar students there from Herts and the north London commuter belt. This closure of Philosophy and local opportunities for young people like them is heartbreaking.💔

Difficult times at the University of Nottingham - the whole of the Department of Philosophy is formally at risk of redundancy, with plans to get rid of 7 people in the department. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Every General Election, Panini should bring out a parliament sticker album.

Post your warning sign

This entire pointlessly destructive war so far has cost the US military around $60 billion, which is around twice the amount cut from USAID which saved millions of lives.

If AI was genuinely useful your employees would choose to use it, you wouldn't have to mandate its use.

Went to the Gwen John exhibition at the National Museum in Cardiff yesterday and it was wonderful

"Switzerland still has a stockpile sufficient to feed its entire population for three months and is increasing it to a year. The UK government’s advice to households is to have three days’ worth of food in their cupboards."

“Can someone with skills clean this up and make a 10-hour YouTube version?” #sheffield

redactio ad absurdum

Every year for the past decade, our philosophy editor, Nigel Warburton, has picked his best five philosophy books of the year. Here are all his choices -- from Buddhism to utilitarianism and Hannah Arendt to Zhuangzi: fivebooks.com/category/phi...

“Existential phenomenology, far from being an esoteric philosophical discipline, has crucial political importance in helping people collectively see themselves as agents of change.” Excellent short article from Tris Hedges —

#philsky 30-minute interview with me on Dublin City FM about The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy ::

I'm giving an online talk on Saturday morning with the Southern Association for Psychotherapy and Counselling :: Bad Faith, Bullshit, and Belonging :: mainly Beauvoir and Sartre with some Kierkegaard and Heidegger Everyone is welcome! Booking is here: bit.ly/SAPCbfbb

“When faced with greed, envy, calumny, perfidy, or lies, people […] say indulgently, ‘That's human!’ With an excuse like that, they clearly show that they are renouncing any expectations of generosity or greatness from man.” —Simone de Beauvoir In this new 🐧 📕 ed. @jonathanwebber.bsky.social 👏 👇

✨✨ The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me is published today in the UK! (Australia and North America publication is next February.) ✨✨

✨✨ The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me is published today in the UK! (Australia and North America publication is next February.) ✨✨

🎈Book launch! The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by Jonathan Webber Wednesday 12 November 2025 : 18:00 - 19:30 Oat & Bean, 26 Park Place, Cardiff CF10 3BA Everyone is welcome! No need to register. Just turn up!

Books. No cookie preferences. No cookies. No GDPR. No pop ups. No bots. No floating videos. No AI. No ads. No trackers. No misinformation. No fascist techbros. No distracting animations. No paywalls. No influencers. How good are these things? Books are frickin awesome

Police officer, running up to me: "Stop, what's that brown liquid you're pouring into the drain?" Me: "It's 1,000 gallons of untreated sewage" PO: "Phew, I thought for a minute it was a few dregs of coffee"

Post 16 White Paper is out at last www.gov.uk/government/p...

I think it's excessive to remove all his titles. He should have just been downgraded to The Marquis Of Granby, or maybe The Slug And Lettuce.

“the accumulated knowledge of generations … is stored in universities as it is stored nowhere else, and it continues to be produced there, patiently and as far as the wide world goes almost anonymously, by generations of scholars in communion with each-other”

Calling English a 'rip-off degree' is one of the most blatant exhibitions of personal barbarism I've ever seen. You've demonstrated nothing but the poverty of your own mind.

British monarchy encloses 150 acres of public land for their private use.

UPenn professors have responded forcefully to the Trump administration's that colleges sign a "compact" in order to secure funding: "When an invitation is accompanied by consequences for not accepting it, it is in fact a threat, not an invitation." aaup-penn.org/statement-by...

“AI has turbocharged the spread of bullshit and falsehoods. It is not able to produce actual, qualitative academic work, despite the claims of some in the AI industry. As researchers, as universities, we should be clearer about pushing back against these false claims by the AI industry.”

Anyway, you do have to wonder what this means for "growth": yesterday's ID proposals are *designed* to make access to work more difficult for people on low incomes, and they come with the side effect of potentially squashing a growing domestic technology sector.

“After nearly a decade of mutilating the country to address the ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration, we’re still being told the precise same nonsense we were told in 2016, or in 2005.” — @iandunt.bsky.social

“Either we have copyright law or we don’t. Either plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property are anathema to higher education or they aren’t. We’re either modeling academic honesty and integrity to our students or we aren’t.”

“AI has turbocharged the spread of bullshit and falsehoods. It is not able to produce actual, qualitative academic work, despite the claims of some in the AI industry. As researchers, as universities, we should be clearer about pushing back against these false claims by the AI industry.”

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

“Assuming scrubbing-brush man wasn’t Banksy himself, though, he inadvertently produced a new work of protest art. The silhouette of the image has seeped into the stone of the court buildings and is at least as powerful as the original image. This could well have been Banksy’s intention”

"Uh, I think it's the wifi..."

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

#philsky A Sad Philosophy Workshop GRIEF, HEARTBREAK, & HALLUCINATIONS Pilar Lopez-Cantero (Antwerp) Becky Millar (Cardiff) Lucy Osler (Exeter) 13:30-17:30, Friday 26 September 1.57 John Percival Building Cardiff University Free! All welcome! Register here: bit.ly/CdfGHH#philsky

In Vienna for the Railway Aesthetics conference, which takes place in and around trains, including several night-trains on the trajectory Vienna – Bucharest – Istanbul. Program includes a panel at the Royal Salon in Bucharest & visit to the Energy Museum in Istanbul lievenameel.hypotheses.org/2605

Coming soon –– The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me :: available now to pre-order from all good bookshops (and that bad one) :: –– contents pages are in the thread below. #philsky

“It is important to get this right,” said Vallance. “We must not get bound down on measuring things that we cannot.” www.timeshighereducation.com/news/patrick...

Public First has found higher education is in the top 3 for exports in 102 constituencies demonstrating the essential role universities & international students play. Public First has also found that international students raise living standards in every UK constituency.

I see Simon Jenkins has written his universities article again.

“A legitimate PhD-level expert in anything,” they said. “Show me a diagram of the US presidents since FDR, with their names and years in office under their photos,” I said.