Jonathan Webber

Also: congratulations!

Suspect that’ll be surprising news to both @jonathanbirch.bsky.social and @birchlse.bsky.social

Superb! Congratulations!

Page from Iris Murdoch's notebook. Thank you to Lucy Bolton and the Iris Murdoch archive at the University of Kingston for the photo. The page reads: Notes on a lecture given by Jean Paul Sartre. Brussels Oct 24 1945. There is a christian & a nonchristian variety of existentialism. They have in common a certain theory of subjectivity. For the subject, essence is not existence. Each man is a "projet". He trancends himself. There are however "universals." There is no "human nature " (in the sense of qualities X Y or Z in every man) but there is a universal "human condition." Existentialists are not relativists in the ordinary sense. Their theory of liberty is crucial. Liberty is not a quality of man. It is a form of act, of being. A transcendence. Man is defined from without

24 October 1945:

Sartre gives a lecture on existentialism in Brussels and one Iris Murdoch is in the audience.

From her notes, this was clearly a version of the now rather famous lecture he was to give in Paris five days later.

Books. No cookie preferences. No cookies. No GDPR. No pop ups. No bots. No floating videos. No AI. No ads. No trackers. No misinformation. No fascist techbros. No distracting animations. No paywalls. No influencers. How good are these things? Books are frickin awesome

Nationalise

Police officer, running up to me: "Stop, what's that brown liquid you're pouring into the drain?"

Me: "It's 1,000 gallons of untreated sewage"

PO: "Phew, I thought for a minute it was a few dregs of coffee"

Post-16 education and skills white paper Post-16 education and skills reforms to develop a skilled workforce and break down barriers to opportunity.

Post 16 White Paper is out at last
www.gov.uk/government/p...

I think it's excessive to remove all his titles. He should have just been downgraded to The Marquis Of Granby, or maybe The Slug And Lettuce.

“We should support universities. We should cherish the value of what they do and recognise that if we run them down for sport we will not realise what we’ve lost until it’s gone. And, just once in a while, we should give students a break.”

The joy of university For those who are privileged to go to university, they get three years suspended between childhood and the adult world

“the accumulated knowledge of generations … is stored in universities as it is stored nowhere else, and it continues to be produced there, patiently and as far as the wide world goes almost anonymously, by generations of scholars in communion with each-other”

Snap!

With the comma in a different place it could be a native of Sheffield explaining to any one person that their affections cannot be won over by gifts.

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.

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

‘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

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

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

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...

‘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...

“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.”

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

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.

Thank you!

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.

“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

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.

“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.”

The paper itself is here:

‘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...

“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.”

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

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

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

“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”

"Uh, I think it's the wifi..."

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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.