saditious.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

My department, the fantastic CRMEP at Kingston University, is due to be closed mid-way through my PhD, as part of a slew of cuts to the Humanities and Social Sciences. We will be launching a challenge to this. Last year they tried to close us, and we fought it and won - we hope we can win again.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

An update on the Spinoza and Simone Weil conference: the other organisers and I have decided to extend the deadline for submissions to March 10th, to give anyone who wanted to submit an additional week to prepare their abstracts. See the new CFP below:

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

What is the term 'left-liberal' supposed to mean? I've been seeing it get used a lot recently, and in some pretty baffling ways.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Time to evict AirBnB from your life, if you have't already.

submitted 15 days ago • 209 comments

Americans this weekend:

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

Thomas Schelling in The Strategy of Conflict points out that often the strongest bargaining strategy can be to behave in an utterly unpredictable fashion. That can work well until people realise you’re not to be relied on and find other ways of getting what they need.

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

The assault on scientific knowledge that the Trump administration is carrying out will make the Lysenko affair look like a rounding error by comparison.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

The exchange between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office today in which our country attacked the victim in defense of a brutal aggressor has to be one of the most shameful moments in Modern American history.

submitted 2 days ago • 120 comments

Prof. Benjamin Braude shared with me this digital event on Simone Weil that he is hosting. It looks like it will be an incredible talk, shedding a lot of light on the mysteries surrounding the crafting of Weil's image today!

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

I've been really struggling to have hope for things these past few days. How do people do it? I guess it's easier when you've got your head down and are too busy to consider where everything's going, but all it takes is looking up briefly for things to become completely derailed.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

I hate spring: that scent in the air, the crisp breeze, the sun finally emerging after winter - it makes everything feel too sentimental.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

"In the near future we will be hot and imperiled and stupid. It is too late." - @annakornbluh.bsky.social

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

My essay on Pierre Bayle didn't make the cut for the essay competition I submitted it to. But I still believe in the piece. Are there any other history of philosophy essay competitions around?

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Looking at contemporary western lefties, Realism - stop being so moralistic, focus on accurate strategic analysis - seems right. But when I look at historical socialist states I'm not like "damn why did they keep letting moral qualms get in the way of ruthless actions!?" Kinda the opposite, really.

submitted 5 days ago • 17 comments

Two Weeks In The Death Spiral Of Cardiff University, by an anonymous academic. This is truly shocking read. The Cardiff executive board should hang their heads in shame. voice.cymru/two-weeks-in...

submitted 10 days ago • 31 comments

I was at a talk being given by Quentin Skinner today. I had a chuckle to myself when at the end of his response to the other panellists, he declared, "Down with Althusser, up with Marx!"

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

* @lastpositivist.bsky.social intensifies*

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Taught Lenin on imperialism this morning and was struck again by the total disconnect between Lenin's analysis and that of so many contemporary anti-imperialists. For Lenin, an imperialist world order is necessarily multipolar. He mocks Kautsky for thinking that there could be a...

submitted 16 days ago • 3 comments

this will be the first in a series of public talks on this topic that I will give in Europe and the US in 2025

submitted 9 days ago • 7 comments

Steve Nadler, 'Whatever is, is in God: substance and things in Spinoza’s metaphysics,' p.68: "Spinoza’s move is a naturalistic and reductive one. God is identical either with all of Nature or with only a part of Nature; for this reason, Spinoza shares something with the reductive pantheist.

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments

“Dogs must be carried.” “For heaven’s sake. Where on earth do I get a dog?” Very old Terry Eagleton joke about ambiguity that comes into my head every time I get on an escalator.

submitted 11 days ago • 13 comments

The BPA has launched a student essay competition for its #BritishPhilosophyFortnight #PhilosophyMatters campaign! Generously sponsored by #OCRExams #OCRRS #AQA Details: bpa.ac.uk/activities/phi… Deadline: 7/3/25. #philosophy #students #alevel #philsky @alevelphilosophy.bsky.social #TeamRE

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

The Blind Person's Stick in Weil and Descartes works.hcommons.org/records/yxvr... New article on Descartes's 'bâton d'aveugle' as wielded by Merleau-Ponty, Gregory Bateson, Lambros Malafouris, and (especially) Simone Weil.

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

History of Theory KEYNOTE Giuseppe Bianco (Venice): Is there such a thing as French philosophical concepts? Opening lecture for the international research network "Histories and Futures of French Travelling Concepts", Copenhagen 19 March – feel free to join! www.facebook.com/events/64471...

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Just 12 days left to submit your papers for the Spinoza and Simone Weil conference, please share far and wide!

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

The US is basically going full Orwell now: a Center for Disease Control that lets diseases run rampant and a Department of Education that spreads ignorance and misinformation, all under the rule of a Department of Government Efficiency that is engineered to preserve wasteful cuts to billionaires.

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

I’ve started reading some of the literature in philosophy on vagueness, and all this talk of baldness is making me self-conscious

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

A Valentine from Nietzsche: “Learning to love.—We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people. 1/2

submitted 16 days ago • 3 comments

@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social talks about 'Elite Capture,' how political culture goes wrong--and how to put it right.

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

In §49 of the TdIE, Spinoza says "in the beginning we must take the greatest care that we arrive at knowledge of such a Being as quickly as possible." Deleuze thinks that this is a really important methodological point, but has anyone else written about it?

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Now that AI has developed this far, and is so boring, are any philosophers _still_ not fully convinced that Descartes was right?

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

www.ipetitions.com/petition/pro...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

me reading a contemporary philosophical position: this is just Locke's view with a paint job me reading historical philosophers: if you look at the change in wording between the fourth and fifth editions of the Essay, he says "by only" instead of "only by", so it's essentially an entirely new view

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

I'm pleased to finally be able to share the Call for Papers for the upcoming conference 'Spinoza and Simone Weil: Influences and Interconnections,' taking place in Oxford on May 22nd-23rd. See the images below for the full details, and I look forward to receiving your abstracts!

submitted 33 days ago • 2 comments