This interview with Professor Michael A. Peters is conceived as a direct response to a recent dialogue with Steve Fuller, published under the title “Knowledge Socialism and/or Capitalism? An Interview with Steve Fuller” (Yang 2025). While Fuller suggested blurring or even abandoning the distinction between knowledge socialism and knowledge capitalism—and highlighted the relevance of pre-Marxist figures such as Saint-Simon and Proudhon—Peters engages these provocations critically and constructively, offering both theoretical clarifications and extensions.

Initially, we want to thank the editors of Techné and the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective and Anette Forss for her insightful work on nursing education. Forss presents a compelling argument for reflexively learning from technological breakdowns. She works through three cases that are generous and kind in their ability to see beyond instrumentalist uses of technology and education. Technology is not neutral and does not ensure better teaching or learning.

II want to thank Taylor Matthews for their thoughtful and detailed engagement with my paper. Their commentary not only reconstructs the main commitments of Act First Responsibilism (AFR) with admirable clarity, but it also raises several important challenges that help to sharpen and clarify the view. … . Article Citation: Müller, Nastasia. 2025. “A Reply to Matthews on ‘Taking Virtuous Acts, not Virtuous Traits, as Evaluatively and Conceptually Primary’.” …

The Islamization of knowledge (or, more narrowly, philosophy) is a project that rests on the premise that reason and revelation are not in conflict. But how is this harmony operationalized? Can religious premises function with the same epistemic authority as scientific or rational ones? Amir Rastin Toroghi and Vahideh Fakhar Noghani (2024) argue that Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. ca. 1635 AD) transcendent philosophy provides precisely such a framework: one in which Islamic content is not merely inspirational (context of discovery) but also justificatory (context of justification).

Knut Hamsun’s Pan is famous for its love story and the extraordinary psychological portrayal of infatuation. Its very title and the magical North, where wilderness seeps into human settlements, reveal its romantic backdrop. What is easily noticed as we progress through the novel is how social affairs, with their unspoken rules, along with the fatal attraction to Edwarda, slowly drag Lieutenant Thomas Glahn—once content in the woods—to his ruin and early death.

I want to thank Peter Baumann for the thoughtful and gracious reply (2025) to my paper (2025). At every point in that piece, Baumann’s commentary is charitable but fair in pressing important worries for and questions of my work. By engaging with such commentators, our thinking is improved and the larger conversation is advanced. I hope my quick rejoinder can simply add a bit to that conversion.

Volume 14, Issue 9, 1–146, September 2025 ❧ Dembić, Sanja. 2025. “Paradigm Cases and Epistemic Aims in the Inquiry of Conspiracy Theories.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (9): 1–6. ❧ Politi, Vincenzo. 2025. “Kuhn and the Great Man of Science: What’s the Argument? A Reply to Mizrahi.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (9): 7–14. ❧ Anderson, Derek.

Abstract The excitement about Large Language Models (LLMs) has led some to consider the possibility that they could be artificial epistemic authorities. For instance, after considering arguments for and against granting LLMs the status of epistemic authorities, Hauswald (2025) argues that the standard view of epistemic authorities should be revised to accommodate LLMs as epistemic authorities. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on LLM or chatbot epistemology by sketching two arguments against granting LLMs the status of epistemic authorities.

Catherine Z. Elgin’s Epistemic Ecology (2025) presents a bold reconceptualization of epistemology that challenges the traditional spectatorial view of knowledge in favor of an agential, ecological approach (13–15). The book’s central thesis is that autonomous epistemic agents actively construct their understanding through dynamic interactions with their natural and social environments. This thesis offers a compelling alternative to mainstream epistemological frameworks. Among the book’s many innovative concepts, perhaps none is more striking or consequential than Elgin’s notion of “felicitous falsehoods.” … .

David W. Bates’s An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence enters at a moment when our understanding of the human is caught between two powerful but incompatible narratives. In the first, the human is reduced to a “brain”, a computational organ whose routines can be modeled, optimized, and in many cases surpassed by machines. In the second, the human is understood as historically situated and socially produced, distributed across infrastructures, institutions, and relations that both enable and constrain action.

This essay attempts to comprehend how one might think about old masjids in Malabar using Martin Heidegger's idea of "dwelling," while also relating it to Talal Asad's concept of "tradition," and Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. It is not, obviously, looking to a universal definition of masjids in Malabar. Rather, it is, in the most mundane sense, a thought exercise. Through his hermeneutic phenomenology, I use Heidegger's philosophy to help me make sense of some of my thoughts regarding buildings, particularly masjids.

We don’t need a paradigm shift. We need a revolution.— Nicole Bauer I love intellectuals. I crave robust intellectual exchange, whether that conversation is challenging or affirming … or both at the same time, as the best conversations commonly are. It is not the agreement, or the disagreement, that matters the most to me. It is having the conversation. It is not the content that matters.

Like Foucault, I suspect that a new anthropology, a new form of mind, a new ‘episteme’ is taking shape, as the previous understandings of the human disappear, like figures written into the sand on a beach. In the codes of modern mystical experiences, I detect a future mentality attempting contact with our own hopelessly inadequate religious and rational forms of thinking.

Abstract Since its inception, philosophy has engaged in a critical examination of our claims to knowledge and understanding. In a recent paper, Jeroen de Ridder extends the epistemological analysis to inquiry based on the internet. He warns us that design features of the internet may lead us astray and make us overconfident in our claims to epistemic accomplishments, with a particular focus on understanding.

According to moral encroachment, whether a doxastic attitude—such as a belief—is justified depends partly on moral considerations. For instance, if holding a belief involves a high risk of harm, one needs stronger evidence for that belief to be justified compared to situations where the moral stakes are low. In her article “In Defense of Robust Moral Encroachment” (2025), Alexandra Lloyd argues that, assuming that moral encroachment holds, we should adopt a robust version of this view rather than a cautious one.

There’s a venerable tradition of worrying about the human tendency to get lost in fantasy. Plato wanted to regulate myth making; Jesus recommended you gouge out that lusty eye of yours; Augustine prayed for relief from sexy dreams; Cervantes warned of the dangers of reading too many romance stories. The tradition continues today. Of course, we all recognize there’s nothing wrong with a stable, sober-minded, respectful adult imagining that promotion, maybe even a dinosaur from time to time.

This reply is part of a dialogue in which something interesting emerges from the contrasting perspectives. Neil Levy and Jason Kawall have diametrically opposed positions on the relationship between epistemic or intellectual autonomy and our nature as social creatures. In brief, Levy sees epistemic autonomy as extraneous once we realize how much work skilled interdependence can do.[1] I am highly sympathetic to the idea that epistemic dependence is a domain of skill and that skilled social cognition can act as a conduit for information on all sort of subjects.

Routledge has commissioned a Handbook on Non-Belief to which members of the SERRC collective are invited to contribute. It is a follow-up to this recently published book by the anthropologist Jack David Eller, Apisteology: The Study of Not-Believing. As you can see, the idea of ‘non-belief’ covers a broad range of topics across several disciplines. However, ‘non-belief’ is understood as clearly different from ‘belief’ and ‘ignorance’, both of which has been subject to considerable normative and empirical investigation.

In “AI and Epistemic Agency: How AI Influences Belief Revision and Its Normative Implications” (2025) Mark Coeckelbergh argues that AI, as currently used in the inner workings of social media, undermines epistemic agency through direct manipulation and the creation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.[1] While we agree with Coeckelbergh’s main thesis, we disagree on some points of detail and offer additional thoughts on exactly how AI poses a threat to epistemic agency.

In “The Contribution of Logic to Epistemic Injustice” (2024) Franci Mangraviti argues that certain forms of epistemic injustice are tied to logic. This is largely because logic structures our concepts, it has associations with certain social identities, and logic teaching tends to be conservative. The net effect is that there are cases in which certain individuals are unjustly excluded from the use and production of epistemic resources—and logic is partly to blame.

Post-Europe is the most concise and personal in a series of works by Yuk Hui—one of the most original and productive young world philosophers of technology. Its core two chapters are adapted from lectures delivered at Taipei National University of the Arts, lectures that picked up and advanced a trajectory of thinking initiated by The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay on Cosmotechnics…

William Tuckwell’s “Virtue Signalling to Signal Trustworthiness, Avoid Distrust, and Scaffold Self-Trust” (2024) offers a defense of virtue-signaling speech acts against recent criticism by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke (2020), who argue for a default moral prohibition against such speech acts. Tuckwell’s argument is penetrating and convincing, but also skirts many of the complex details required to fully engage with Tosi and Warmke’s consequentialist argument against grandstanding.

Scientific communities can and should be isolated without prior recourse to paradigms; the latter can then be discovered by scrutinizing the behaviour of a given community’s members. If this book were being rewritten, it would therefore open with a discussion of the community structure of science, a topic that has recently become a significant subject of sociological research and that historians of science are also beginning to take seriously.

Abstract Matthew Shields (2022) raises two criticisms of generalism: that it makes unjustified general claims about Conspiracy Theorists and that it fails to consider “Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists” (DITs) as paradigm cases, despite the fact that they are more politically propagandistic, epistemically insulated and harmful than Non-DITs. While I agree with many of Shields’s criticisms of generalism, I challenge his claim that DITs should be considered paradigm cases solely on the basis of the features he identifies.

Val Dusek: A Memorial, Francis Remedios. Book: ❦ Soler, Léna. 2025. Contingency Is Here to Stay—in Science as in Any Other Human Enterprise. Blacksburg, VA: Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 14, Issue 8, 1–75, August 2025 ❧ Basham, Lee. 2025. “Sky Pilot Epistemology: Heaven’s Gate and Masada.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (8): 1–13. ❧ Cormick, Claudio and Valeria Edelsztein.