Richard Pettigrew

@wiglet1981.bsky.social

3.7K followers 1K following 1.2K posts

Philosopher at University of Bristol 🏳️‍🌈 he/him

https://richardpettigrew.com/

Books: Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality | Choosing for Changing Selves | Dutch Book Arguments | Accuracy and the Laws of Credence | Who Are Universities For? .. more

Videos

Philosophy 39%

Computer science 14%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Marshall Abrams @marshall0i.bsky.social · 12h

The meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy will be held 5/20-22/2026 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Paper submissions in all areas of analytic philosophy are welcomed. Deadline 1/30/2026. meta.phil.ufl.edu/host/sep/mee...

Conference Page

meta.phil.ufl.edu

Reposted by Shannon Vallor, Michael H. Whitworth, Richard Pettigrew , and 1 more Shannon Vallor, Michael H. Whitworth, Richard Pettigrew, Jack Stilgoe

Paul Brislen @brislen.nz · 13h

I don’t think we should have ceded control quite so quickly and without so much as a fight.

A giant yellow sign on the side of the road announces “YOU ARE ENTERING A FRUIT FLY CONTROLLED AREA” and below that in smaller letters “Make sure you know the rules.”

Reposted by Steven French, Richard Pettigrew

Albert Dros @albertdros.bsky.social · 1d

Snow in the Netherlands earlier this week.

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Michael Morris @michaelmorrisphil.bsky.social · 1d

Firle Beacon, January 2025

Reposted by Joe R. Feagin, Richard Pettigrew

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 1d

Professor Peterson response to censorship at Texas A&M. (philosopher) king

Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social · 1d

Some have pointed out that the whole letter would have fit in the alt text window, so here is a version with the whole letter in alt text.

The letter reads:

Dr. Sweet,

As you may have noticed, I believe it is important to document that philosophy professors at Texas A&M University are not permitted to teach Plato at their own discretion.

To comply with the new censorship requirements, I have replaced the affected module with lectures on free speech and academic freedom. The censored material is marked in red in the attached document. The required text for the new module is:

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato”, The New York Times, January 8, 2026.

Texas A&M Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato Because of Gender Rules - The New York Times.

Respectfully,
Martin Peterson

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 1d

Haha! No Bayesianism!!! And yes, I’m hoping to make it very accessible. It’s meant to be fully public and pitched at a general audience, I think.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

Oh wow, that is extremely hot! I was once at Uluru in those temperatures, but it’s so dry there that it didn’t seem so bad. But I’m guessing Sydney not like that

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

Absolutely! It would be great to talk to her about this. I often feel if we were to think more clearly about higher education, the OU would be at the centre of most discussions.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

Our present system serves them rather poorly, and a system that serves them well must put lifelong learning at its centre. I will describe what such a system might look like.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

In this lecture, I'll argue that higher education serves a great many aims, and many of those are central to individual lives and the broader life of the society in which we live. What’s more, I will argue that, once we identify those aims, we see that a much more radical conclusion follows.

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

Abstract: When academics try to identify the aims of higher education, they tend to emphasise a single central aim, and then appeal to that aim to justify something close to the current system, perhaps adapted a little to remove certain barriers to access.

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Steven French, Michael Morris , and 1 more Joanna Bryson, Steven French, Michael Morris, Brian Weatherson

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

In case anyone is in London and would like to come, I’ll be giving the Daniel C. Dennett Lecture in Culture and Technology on February 19th at 6pm.

Lifelong Learning and the Many Aims of Higher Education

philevents.org/event/show/1...

View of Tower Bridge from Northeastern University London campus

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 2d

This is such a great book

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Brian Weatherson @bweatherson.bsky.social · 2d

I hope everyone is enjoying the Eastern APA. I'd like to see a bunch of the sessions today, but I've got to teach classes before getting there tomorrow.

I'm going to be a panelist on a session on this excellent book:

academic.oup.com/book/59987

Property Versatility and Copredication

Abstract. Nearly all properties are, to a certain extent, versatile: there are many different ways to instantiate them. Consider for example a light-blue s

academic.oup.com

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 3d

ah, that was a long day of writing, I’ll just watch some tv and forget about philosophy for a few hou—

Samantha Bond saying ‘the problem is we’re empiricists’ in the Marlow murders series

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 3d

do you think that in the qing dynasty when people created lapsang souchong that the snobbish tea drinkers talked about it the way we currently talk about putting flavoured syrup in coffee

Reposted by Jussi T. Eronen, Jonathan Birch, Richard Pettigrew , and 1 more Jussi T. Eronen, Jonathan Birch, Richard Pettigrew, Tuomas Kankaanpää

Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 3d

Tired: Everything evolves to be a crab.

Wired: Everything evolves to eat ants.

Mammals have evolved into ant eaters 12 times since the dinosaur age, study finds

Mammals have developed some unusual eating habits over the past 100 million years, but a new study has uncovered the surprising lengths to which some have gone to satisfy one of the more peculiar—a ta...

phys.org

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

QuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 3d

reading moby-dick and getting brainwashed by Big Spermaceti

"I like reading because there are no ads in books"
Oh, my sweet summer child. There's plenty of ads in them. Brands pay good money to popular authors for product placement.

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 4d

-5 degrees centigrade in Central London right now. Please send us your contempt for treating what counts as a mild winter for others as an extreme hardship.

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Brian D. Earp, PhD @briandavidearp.bsky.social · 4d

Wow, OpenAI's ChatGPT just repeatedly denied that Maria Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, despite multiple corrections from me, with sources... open.substack.com/pub/briandav...

Reposted by Steve Peers, Robert W. Wallace, Michael A. Clemens , and 11 more Steve Peers, Robert W. Wallace, Michael A. Clemens, Leigh Sparks, Robert Black, David R. Miller, Tom Griffin, Stephen Ryan, Richard Pettigrew, Greg Linden, Aviel Roshwald, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, David Darmofal, Harvey J. Kaye

Geoff Garin @geoffgarin.bsky.social · 4d

Here is the Trump Doctrine, as articulated by Stephen Miller in his truly frightening interview with Jake Tapper this afternoon. It is very much like the doctrine of the dictators we fought and defeated in World War II and of Putin today. It is un-American at its very core.

Reposted by Will Jennings, Jacob T. Levy, Richard Pettigrew

Joshua Murray-Nevill @joshuamurraynevill.bsky.social · 4d

As someone who wrote a dissertation on that damnable Frenchman; one can only hope.

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew, Brian Weatherson

Barry Lam @hiphination.bsky.social · 4d

With the precision of a philosopher and the geekiness of a game-lover, Thi Nguyen shows how gaming has quietly colonized the rest of our lives. Required reading for understanding how values are being redefined through metrics, rankings, and scoring. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252...

The Score by C. Thi Nguyen: 9780593655658 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us...

www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Antinomie @antinomie.bsky.social · 4d

AGI = Artificial German Idealism

Reposted by Ben H. Ansell, Richard Pettigrew

Seva @seva.bsky.social · 4d

claude code is fucking insane

i know literally NOTHING about Hegel. ZERO. and it just built me a complete system of German idealism

Richard Pettigrew @wiglet1981.bsky.social · 4d

Oh, thank you! That’s so nice to hear.

Reposted by Richard Pettigrew

Dave Richeson @divbyzero.bsky.social · 4d

Here's an old blog post I wrote about a footnote in Turing's 1937 article "On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem," in which he gave a topological argument that any alphabet must be finite. divisbyzero.com/2010/05/27/t...