Every accusation is a confession.

Book launch for “Methods in the Philosophy of Science: a user’s guide”. Ftf in Exeter and online on the 29th of Sept feat Sophie Veigl, Kerry McKenzie, Hasok Chang, and me. It should be fun! (the book will be open access in July, contact me in the meantime) www.exeter.ac.uk/events/detai... #philsci

what sticks in my craw... that pretty much is prejudice. being mad that suddenly you're hearing a lot of Spanish/Polish/etc is no better than being mad that you see men holding hands or a person whose gender you can't easily classify. it's bad to be governed by such reactions (2/5)

(Oh and Trans Rights are Human Rights, let's get that one in there too)

elite centrist/lib transphobia is one of those classic contrarian things where they’ve built up a huge pile of facially convincing “evidence” that collapses immediately if you put it under serious scrutiny

Ah, but have they thought about it harder than the author of “The Dynamics of Nonbeing”?

Pet parrots which typically live alone (whilst those in the wild live in large flocks) were given the technology to call each other. They would use it for up to three hours a day, and developed favourite friends 💔 on.ft.com/3K05vhS

Leutnant Gustl is an avatar for our times.

I’m in Vienna right now. A city which went from being the intellectual and cultural capital of the world to a “provincial backwater” (to quote Brian Barry) in a couple of decades due to nationalism, anti-semitism and fascism which drove away the leading scholars and artists it didn’t murder.

Whoever wrote the press release is a demon.

Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.

I think fundamentally, the ability to care about the rights of a small and vulnerable minority (of whom you might know no members) is an important sign of whether you are committed to human rights out of principle, or out of mere convenience.

we need a deduction cooker that simply entails food from a set of premises

sleeping on it, it is admittedly a quite funny bit to in effect say, i proved some theorems about large cardinals and that's why i'm an expert on the ontology of sex viz à viz legal classifications

I am a bit weirded out that so many British philosophers have such strong opinions about the organization of American high school sports. Including, apparently, the Wykham Professor of Logic.

Ok my cis friends, we are going to need a lot of you to step the fuck up and fight hard for us www.them.us/story/trump-...

"And is this possible world nearby right now?"

It's like if philosophers wrote a brief supporting the exclusion of adopted children from inheritance law saying: not only is 'biological children' a reasonably natural concept, there's also no reasonably natural concept whose extension is adopted and biological children

This is virulently anti-trans: not simply arguing that there's a reasonably natural concept of transition-independent biological sex (fine) but also that there is no reasonably natural biological or social concept whose extensions is trans and cis women dailynous.com/2025/09/19/p...

Oy. That gives me a sad.

I just learned that Brigitte in The Sound of Music (Angela Cartwright) and Lambert in Alien (Veronica Cartwright) are sisters. This is the crossover we need.

I think it’s high time we take back the national narrative. For centuries Americans of all races, genders, religions, and abilities have worked to create a more perfect union, and we should shout from the rooftops that WE are America. Not these idiot white supremacist authoritarians.

I say this with my whole entire chest, as the mom of a toddler: THIS IS BULLSHIT. This will make lifesaving vaccines less available, confuse ppl, decrease vaccine uptake, and KILL CHILDREN. Everyone who supposed this has the blood of children on their hands. SEND SKEET.

This might seem incongruous to a comedian getting censored, but if you’re a teacher, TEACH HARDER. They’re at least as scared of us as they are of Kimmel because we teach history, reasoning, ethics, and all the stuff that scares the piss out of them. Teach with courage.

[Manifestly fails to take the stakes or consequences seriously]

an uncomfortable, hurtful proposition, that weak-kneed debate "liberals" seem unwilling to entertain, is that reactionaries are forcibly imposing ideas that have been intellectually discredited, and that we are not going to be able to debate our way out of this predicament

I am now starting to suspect that people doom posting themselves into saying it doesn't matter that Trump is wildly unpopular because he is going to do a dictatorship are themselves an op. Dictatorships aren't stable by magic, they need people to buy in and go along with them. This matters.

"Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself." Ta-Nehisi Coates, with receipts.

Certainly not a *good* movie, but still one of my favorite of his.

Very glad to hear this!

2015: “oh no, it’s the dystopian future where everyone is playing dumb hypnotic games on their little screen.” 2025: “The dumb hypnotic games are actually best-case scenario; everything else your little screen can do to you is worse.”

If you’re a woman working in logic, please consider checking and adding/updating your entry in this directory: womeninlogic.org/WiLSpreadshe... The more up to date it is, the better it can serve to increase our visibility, and the more comprehensive the directory is, the greater its use!

God, I wish I were type-A.

Deadline day: Two tenure letters for colleagues. Sabbatical activity report. Spring course schedule. Paperwork for the first year seminar I’m teaching. And it’s the drop/add deadline, so lots of advisor and instructor signatures.

"Our journal will only be as credible as the articles we publish" *proceeds to publish the most embarrassing parade of garbage you have ever seen in your life*

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

“You can have a verbal conversation like you would with a professor and you can interact with it,” Well this makes me want to set fire to literally everything. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

You may well be cheating yourself. Not always. But perhaps often enough.

The 6yo: Don’t start till I say ‘go’. Me: [starts] I’m going to keep this up until she can explain the use/mention distinction to me.

Bill Kristol having a more firm position on trans rights than the Democratic establishment is one of the weirdest things about this timeline.

I wrote about this problem in The Death of Expertise. (My solution, despite years of good evals, was to have other faculty observe my class and give me feedback, even when I was senior and tenured.) by @rosehorowitch.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Better sub: Facts at odds with knee jerk bigoted speculation promoted by national media.

So you’re criticizing journalistic outlets for, e.g., claiming that the killer’s ammunition was inscribed with pro-trans symbols? Seems to me an odd way to go about it.

One of the best features of a language is failures of compositionality

liberalism exists because last time we tried to settle the question of "who are the real Christians" without liberalism the 30 Years War killed a third of everyone living in what is now Germany

“Kirk & I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side of the continued possibility of American politics.” So it’s personal? B/c if you were a Black woman or transgender, Kirk would not imagine you having any role in the future of American politics.

“awful people don’t deserve to be killed, but they don’t deserve to be praised, either” is apparently a thought too complex for the pundit mind