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Jonathan Webber

@jonathanwebber.bsky.social

400 followers 280 following 150 posts

Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone

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Philosophy 37%

Political science 17%

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Sep 9

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

Image is book cover with the release date beneath: 13 November 2025.

Artwork on the book cover is Marie Raymond's painting Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute, 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5 cm, © ADAGP, Paris, banque d’images de l’ADAGP – an abstract painting in yellows, greys, whites, and black.

Book is published in Penguin Classics.

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Reposted by Jonathan Webber

fesshole 🧻 @fesshole.bsky.social · 1d

I appeared on University Challenge years ago. I didn't actually attend the university in question. I used to take short cuts through the campus and saw the notice for the try outs. Went along for a laugh and made the team. No one ever checked if I was actually a student there.

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Reposted by Steve Peers, Marina Jirotka, Roger Luckhurst , and 3 more Steve Peers, Marina Jirotka, Roger Luckhurst, Julian R. Betts, Jonathan Webber, Vaughan S. Roberts

Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 2d

The same is true in chess. Best way to disguise your mistakes there is to play as noisily as you can.

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 6d

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

‘I think it’s selfish’: William and Kate face backlash over Windsor Great Park no-go zone

Royal couple’s desire for more privacy means 2.3-mile perimeter exclusion zone and less public land for walkers

www.theguardian.com

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 7d

Yes! Especially as it’s about three times the length of Philosophical Fragments.

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Scott L. Greer, Philip Nel , and 7 more Dorothy Bishop, Scott L. Greer, Philip Nel, Yannis Hamilakis, Joni Lovenduski, Scott A. Imberman, Jonathan Webber, Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, Nelson Flores, Nathan P. Kalmoe

Hunter Walker @hunterw.bsky.social · 8d

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...

Statement by the AAUP-Penn Executive Committee on the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education | AAUP–Penn

October 2, 2025 We have received reports that Penn has been “invited” to sign a so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” by the federal government, and that failing to do so wou...

aaup-penn.org

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 13d

I do wonder how many people who want Joy Division’s Atmosphere end up with Russ Abbott’s.

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Reposted by Jonathan Webber

Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 13d

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.

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 14d

Thank you!

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 14d

“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

ID cards are a terrible, terrible idea

Many people I admire believe firmly in ID cards, or have grown to accept them. This is why they're wrong.

iandunt.substack.com

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 15d

“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.”

Advice | Sometimes We Resist AI for Good Reasons

Why higher ed needs to listen to the contrarians in setting policies on using tools like ChatGPT in faculty work.

www.chronicle.com

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 17d

The paper itself is here:

Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia

Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these col...

zenodo.org

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 17d

“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.”

‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University

Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...

www.ru.nl

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 22d

“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”

Everyday philosophy: The irony of erasing Banksy

The street artist’s work leaves an indelible trace in our memories and it will last long after authorities scrub away the paint

www.thenewworld.co.uk

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Andrew Scott, Andrew L. Whitehead , and 5 more Anna O. Law, Andrew Scott, Andrew L. Whitehead, Brian Keegan, Jonathan Webber, Mark Rice, Ann Bartow, Nicole Guenther Discenza

Shacknews @shacknews.com · 23d

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

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Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Anna O. Law, Dorothy Bishop , and 25 more Joanna Bryson, Anna O. Law, Dorothy Bishop, David M. Schultz, Philip N. Cohen, Martin Paul Eve, Judith N. Shklar, Ingo Rohlfing, George McKay, Melanie C. Green, Andrew Jacobs, Christine Kooi, Rob Boddice, Suzanne de Cheveigné, Julia M. Wright, Aoife O’Donoghue, Jonathan Webber, Erin O’Donnell, Brian Weatherson, Stuart White, Nelson Flores, Marcus Credé, Urška Demšar, Thessa Jensen, Kirstin Drenkhahn, Mary McAuliffe, Annette Yoshiko Reed, David Spurrett

Dr. Nick Posegay @nposegay.bsky.social · 23d

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.

By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

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Reposted by Jonathan Webber

Cardiff Philosophy @cardiffphilosophy.bsky.social · 25d

#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

Poster has image of a tearful cyborg woman and the same text as in this post.

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · 29d

Great! Hope you enjoy the book.

And, yes, B&N doesn’t require reading Husserl first — or Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, or Freud for that matter, though having read any of those will influence what you get out of it. There’s plenty in there for everyone!

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Sep 10

Thank you.

I think phenomenology has been over-emphasised, displacing other influences and so giving a distorted image of existentialism. I wanted to provide a more balanced picture — and one that that allows us to see more easily what existentialism can offer to thinking about today’s problems.

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Reposted by Jonathan Webber

Lieven Ameel @lievenameel.bsky.social · Sep 10

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

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Sep 9

Thank you!

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Sep 9

Thank you, Keith. Hope you like it!

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Sep 9

For more about the book over the next few months, follow @rethinkexistent.bsky.social

Reposted by Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Euan G. Ritchie , and 38 more Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell, Euan G. Ritchie, Steve Peers, Elizabeth Stokoe, Ernesto Priego, Ana Delicado, Martin Tomko, Rebecca Sear, David S. Cohen, Jo Barraket, Silvia Secchi, Patrick S. Forscher, Stephen D. Murphy, Beatriz Gallardo Paúls, John Hogan, Christine Kooi, Ben Crum, Stefan M. Herzog, Aoife O’Donoghue, Jonathan Webber, Nikolay Marinov, Tama Leaver, Zen Faulkes, Madeleine Pownall, Erin O’Donnell, David Murakami Wood, Aurélien Mondon, Ann Bartow, Clayton Littlejohn, Henrik Skaug Sætra, Jack Stilgoe, James Connelly, Aleksandra Urman, Juan Ramón, Gary Marcus, Michael Larkin, Alysia Blackham, Hilary J. Allen, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Maksym Polyakov

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

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

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Reposted by Patricia Owens, Jonathan Webber

Lyndsey Stonebridge @lyndseystonebri.bsky.social · Sep 4

“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...

Patrick Vallance hits pause on Research Excellence Framework

Science minister announces review of controversial changes to research environment assessment

www.timeshighereducation.com

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Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Sep 2

resorting to wooden ones

Jonathan Webber @jonathanwebber.bsky.social · Aug 26

#tweetyourview

The lower two-thirds of the photo is grassland with a worn path going straight ahead through it. The upper third is a blue sky with little fluffy clouds. On the horizon in the centre (and quite small) is Stonehenge. Photo taken from a pathway that has been used to approach Stonehenge for over 4000 years.

Reposted by Jonathan Webber