Prof of Sociology, @warwickuni. Founder of Social Epistemology and Author of Humanity 2.0 and Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game
Joined July 2011
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1,874 Photos and videos
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30 Nov 2025
My new book is 'Media and the Power of Knowledge'. It is partly based on lectures I've given over the last 15 years. It updates McLuhan for the age of @X: futurespodcast.net/events/me…
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I agree with Zena. 'How to think' supersedes 'what to think', just as form supersedes content. If content survives, it's because it has been baked into form, as demonstrated by the history of technology, where 'the medium is the message', to coin a phrase.
I don't agree. I think it's a sign of a healthy intellectual culture if training produces different lines of thought and different practical conclusions.
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Whatever the body compels, the mind says 'Kant'.
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Jun 14
If you observe analytic philosophers long enough, you realize that people can talk endlessly to each other in the right way without anyone knowing what they're talking about. You can can test this by ask such philosophers to state things in other terms.
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Jun 14
If one takes seriously the mid-c18 origin of the #aesthetic, it is easy to see why Kant devoted one critique to *both* nature and art as objects of 'judgement' -- specifically about the perception of form in matter.
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Jun 13
The title of this clip is a bit clickbait, but the clip itself is smart at many different levels, especially in terms of how it might apply in today's terms: youtube.com/watch?v=PUJ9aFS2…
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Jun 13
I don't think that @Keir_Starmer should be replaced as PM, but I also don't think that it's @KemiBadenoch's job to save him.
‘If I had one scintilla of her self-belief, I’d be pope!’
James O’Brien envies Kemi Badenoch’s ‘extraordinary detachment from reality’.
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Jun 13
Trump uses trial and error, whereas others would play out the counterfactuals in their mind before acting. His cognition is 'primitive' in that sense.
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Jun 12
Now, that's what I call 'attitude'!
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Jun 12
'Interdisciplinary Science Reviews', the oldest continuous #interdisciplinary journal, has just put out its 50th anniversary issue. You can see all the articles here. Mine, at the end, is deliberately written *without* references: journals.sagepub.com/toc/IDS…
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Jun 12
Spoiler alert: The 'amazing thought' is have fun at other people's expense.
"What an amazing thought that is!"
Nigel Farage reveals the 'amazing' advice Donald Trump once gave him...
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Jun 12
While it's become a party trick for historians to show that past 'canonical' social research was based on bad methods, those methods were no worse than the ones routinely employed for 'policy-oriented' research today.
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Jun 12
Given the amount of conformity that academic institutions demand (mainly to keep themselves afloat), it's easy for individual academics to end up identifying their own freedom with their institution's survival.
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Jun 12
People who dismiss open-mindedness as gullibility -- and there are many such people -- underestimate human resilience.
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Jun 11
This song epitomized the positive vibe I felt between New York and London as a kid in the 1960s: youtube.com/watch?v=Zx06XNfD…
Petula Clark Downtown. original version
Petula Clark Downtown. 1964 snapchat : alexhashs
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Jun 11
Karl Marx is the patron saint of those who think you can write your way into changing the world.
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Jun 11
The number of 'mini-courses' offered to academic staff to keep them apprised of how the university works might lead one to think that either the staff is 'always already' incompetent or the university doesn't know what it's doing.
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Jun 11
When I began my academic career, I was regularly dismissed as a 'self-publicist'. Nowadays, I am still criticized, but nobody brings self-publicity into it because self-publicity has become a condition of professional survival.
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Jun 10
This is the Fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden, where Adam is played by a young Nick Land.
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Jun 10
I review manuscripts for many academic publishers, and I increasingly realize that main beneficiary of my efforts will be AI -- and then the humans who access customized versions of the texts by prompting AI.
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