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Jonathan Webber

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H-index: 18
Philosophy 37%
Political science 17%
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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Steve Peers, Marina Jirotka , and 3 more

iandunt.bsky.social
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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
The same is true in chess. Best way to disguise your mistakes there is to play as noisily as you can.
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
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
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
Yes! Especially as it’s about three times the length of Philosophical Fragments.
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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Dorothy Bishop, Scott L. Greer , and 7 more

hunterw.bsky.social
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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
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

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social
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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
Thank you!

by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
“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
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.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.”
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
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
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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by Jonathan Webber — Reposted by: Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
“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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
“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
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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Anna O. Law, Andrew Scott , and 5 more

shacknews.com
LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI
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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Joanna Bryson, Anna O. Law , and 25 more

nposegay.bsky.social
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

cardiffphilosophy.bsky.social
#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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
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!
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
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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by Lieven Ameel — Reposted by: Jonathan Webber

lievenameel.bsky.social
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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
Thank you!

by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
Thank you, Keith. Hope you like it!
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
For more about the book over the next few months, follow @rethinkexistent.bsky.social
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by Jonathan Webber — Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Jonathan Wolff

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
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, Timnit Gebru, Margaret Mitchell , and 37 more

olivia.science
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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by Lyndsey Stonebridge — Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Patricia Owens

lyndseystonebri.bsky.social
“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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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
resorting to wooden ones
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by Jonathan Webber

jonathanwebber.bsky.social
#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.
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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber

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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber

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Reposted by: Jonathan Webber, Shannon Vallor, Nina Jankowicz , and 14 more

bobkopp.net
“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.
A GPT-5 generated diagram of US presidents since Franklin D. “Roesevelt” to “Goorge W Bush”, “Baruck Obama” and Donald Trump. No George HW Bush (though Ronald Reagan looks a fair bit like him), LBJ, or Joe Biden.
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References

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