Steve Fuller @ProfSteveFuller Twitter profile

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Steve Fuller

5 years

My latest book is *Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the #Transhuman Era* #posthuman #MorphologicalFreedom #Death

Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era: 1 (Posthuman Studies)

Nietzschean Meditations takes its inspiration from the version of Nietzsche that was popular before the Second World War, which stressed the 'Zarathustrian' elements of his thought as the harbinger...

www.amazon.co.uk

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

The main obstacle to our imagining the future properly is that we presume that our ethics and values will remain constant over time.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

I must confess that I've long found the principle of #skininthegame profoundly moral. I respect @nntaleb for having developed this idea as much as he has. There is still much to say about it.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

8 years

#Brexit lesson for #sociology : 'Generation' needs to be up there with class, race and gender as foundational analytic categories.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Universities are gradually undermining their Humboldtian legitimacy by replacing the bond of teaching-research with teaching-administration. It basically incentivizes academics to become apparatchiks, while researchers are incentivized to lose interest in the #university .

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

The reason the #brain is so difficult to understand is not because it's in the business of reflecting the world's complexity but because it's in the business of resolving it.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

1 year

Academia's incentive structure is designed to move academics from the classroom, where they could make a major difference, to an anti-classroom space called 'research' that is less likely to have any consequence whatsoever.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Better late than never? The leading European analytic philosophy journal has just published an article legitimizing #reading as a source of knowledge:

Reading as a source of knowledge

Synthese - This paper argues that reading is a source of knowledge. Epistemologists have virtually ignored reading as a source of knowledge. This paper argues, first, that reading is not to be...

link.springer.com

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

The ultimate point of academic #lectures is for students to see a knowledgeable person talk about their topic -- to provide living proof, if you will, that new knowledge can be integrated into your humanity. It goes way beyond lip syncing to Powerpoints and preparing for exams.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

8 years

We can judge academics by their grant income and citation counts just like we judge people by their bank balances and video game scores.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Academic jargon appears in its most distended forms when talking about something trivial. It's a kind of compensatory behavior for the intrinsic lack of meaning in what's being discussed. Unfortunately, you need to understand the jargon to realize that.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

People would be more open-minded if they realized that you can learn from someone who disagrees with you without believing that what they say is true.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

You need to row back on this one: What's going on in Brazil now and what went on at the US Capitol on 6 Jan 21 is nothing like the post-referendum opposition to #Brexit . You should give the UK credit for civil opposition.

Claire Fox

@Fox_Claire

2 years

Terrible turn of events in #Brazil . This trend - to refuse to support democratic ideal of losers' consent if election result doen'r go yiur way (which we have seen here in UK post referendum, and of course in US) - taken to its logical extreme. Very dangerous.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

1 year

I'm convinced from looking at many academic CVs over the years that grant-getting is an autonomous skill that is only vaguely transferable to genuine academic performance.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

8 years

My latest on #AcademicCaesar -- If we don’t need experts, do we need universities? - University World News:

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

It's a great failure of epistemology and the philosophy of science that academics continue to say that they have 'no idea' how knowledge is produced and validated even in neighbouring fields. No surprise policymakers are sceptical of the value of academic knowledge in general.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 months

The reason that academically trained people leave the university is less to do with no longer wanting to be an academic and more to do with realizing that the university fails to incentivize being an academic.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

What is the goal of #education ? To learn to trust your own judgement. That was the bottom line of the #Enlightenment . It implies nothing about dogmatism. On the contrary, it's about how to change your mind on your own terms.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

When historians finally get a grip on what 'germ plasm' and 'selfish gene' really mean, they'll realize that all along it has been about diminishing the role of the distinctly 'human'. We're not too far away from when this question becomes a hot button political topic.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

How about trying to make AI as energy efficient as the brain? That might turn Musk into a hi-tech eco-warrior. Stranger things have happened

Lifeboat Foundation

@LifeboatHQ

7 years

Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 months

Some people live so much in their own heads that the world ends up serving them endless disappointments.

Dr Naomi Wolf

@naomirwolf

2 months

I am in London for the first time in 5 years. Unrecognizable. Grotesque huge modern buildings looming over historic neighborhoods. No sign of British culture except for vestigial pubs. Huge LED screens in formerly beautiful peaceful streets. People sleeping, living on the

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

@LeftBrexit Except that the 'Remoaners', as you call them, didn't storm anything or commit violence.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

The #PhD is a degree that is valued more outside than inside the community of degree holders. For outsiders, it signifies some high academic achievement. For insiders, it's just a minimal academic job requirement.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

New website launched for my #PostTruth book. Check it out:

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

The interesting reason why people find it hard to admit that reality is 'merely' a #SocialConstruction is that it forces them to take responsibility for either maintaining or changing it. No more ontology as ventriloquism: It's ethics all the way down!

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

Interesting move by @JZarif , saying Iran will take the US to interntional court for a state-based terrorist act against another sovereign state. If the court refuses to take the bait, the credibility of the global order diminishes -- and further retaliation is licenced.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

If I had to recommend one mandatory addition to the philosophy curriculum, it would be a course in the sociology of philosophy. It would immunize philosophers from the worst effects of their own internal politics.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

#Education is a performing art, not a content delivery service. Students need to see academics who can embody what they know in their person, so they can decide how to embody what they know in their person. #Enlightenment

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Academics who are truly interested in whether students #understand taught material should set exam/essay questions that force them to address specified non-standard audiences: e.g. explain Kant's categorical imperative to a grocer.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Perhaps the biggest myth promoted by philosophers about science is that there is something epistemologically deep about #consensus . It's no better than saying that price = value. It confuses the snapshot with the thing photographed.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Call me old fashioned, but I believe that watching a video is not sufficient for understanding something. I still believe it's important to follow up with some reading, and then reach a critical judgement. At least, that's what I expect of my students and myself.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 months

I'll be more impressed once her 'plagiarism' is compared with what might be found in the publications of randomly selected professors in a similar field and of comparable rank. These plagiarism cases simply presume that everyone else is a non-plagiarist.

Christian Miller

@CharacterGap

4 months

Wow, stunning new allegations of plagiarism against one of the main researchers in my field...

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

If you want to 'decolonize' anything, decolonize the Enlightenment from the Frankfurt School's imperial grip on it.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

I suppose the sort of people who think that Slavoj Zizek is a seminal critical theorist also think that Green Day is a seminal punk band.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

A good way to deepen your thinking as you write is to keep your sources mixed throughout. Don't do the scholastic thing of talking about one text, then the next, etc. Your argument should not be reducible to your bibliography. Unfortunately, most academic arguments are.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 days

This is really good!

Mᴏᴛʜᴇʀs Wɪʟʟ Rᴇᴄʟᴀɪᴍ Aᴍᴇʀɪᴄᴀ

@MOMSreclaim

8 days

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: “I think when we think of political qualifications today, we should expand our sense of what those qualifications are. “A political qualification today should include political vision. It should include moral certitude." #marianne2024

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

Since people always seem more intelligent when they're negative, difficult times can make almost any pessimist look like a genius.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Nowadays academics are concerned about their publishers purely for credentialing reasons. But in the past, publishing staff have been crucial in matching authors with audiences they'd otherwise not reach. This seems to be a lost art, largely because academics don't care anymore.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

You need sociology to tell you the rules of the game, but you need philosophy to tell you how seriously you should take them.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

1 year

The cover for my forthcoming book, 'Back to the #University 's Future: The Second Coming of #Humboldt ' ( @SpringerNature )

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

You know you're reading something worth reading when even after the first paragraph you need to put the text down and collect the thoughts you've generated in that simple act of reading.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

When a university instructor says that students must stick to the course materials in their exams/essays, another nail is put in academia's coffin.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

I've watched the #Zizek - #Peterson debate, and Zizek won hands down, not simply because I tend toward his side of things but also because Zizek is clearly the more sophisticated thinker, and that should count for a lot when dealing with complex issues:

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

The cheapest way to acquire moral authority is to complain.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 months

That's because he already knows that his books won't be on the curriculum in 20 years.

Tsarathustra

@tsarnick

5 months

Yuval Noah Harari: we have no idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 months

A university's level of failure can be measured by the amount of time that academics normally spend on administrative work.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

If I had to point to one skill that university students lack, it would be that they are very adept at listing pros and cons, but they're incapable of weighing them to reach a clear final judgement.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

The illusion of competence is maintained through obedience.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

A good way to see that the language of emotion is routinely debased is that we claim to 'care' about people when we're simply being polite to them.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

You don't need to be permanently affiliated to a #university to do #research . However, if you want a captive audience in which you can test the import of your research on a regular basis, then you do need a university. It's called 'teaching'. And that's worth preserving.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Simplicity has no particular virtue other than its effectiveness in the face of complexity.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

If I were @AndrewYang , I'd contemplate a strong third party bid for the US presidency with @zoltan_istvan as VP. It would be more about putting down a marker for 2024, since @realDonaldTrump looks to win 2020.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Academic peer review has a very effective and not too subtle strategy for impeding intellectual change. It simply places a greater burden of proof on those who oppose the status quo. In contrast, those supporting the status quo have (presumably) had that burden borne by others.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Me being #CovidSecure in my first outing to London since the lockdown eased.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

8 years

The last question on #bbcqt was one of the most important: How will UK research be funded post-EU? But no time to answer it!

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

But how will we be able to tell the real from the fake ones?

Guardian Science

@guardianscience

3 years

New £50 note featuring Alan Turing to enter circulation in June

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

The most charismatic feature of a thinker is the incompleteness of their thought.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

#Neoliberalism has fostered a subtle version of Stockholm Syndrome in university life: Academics are rewarded for thinking like administrators.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

I get asked which discipline is the best to master in order to embark on a robustly interdisciplinary career: #Philosophy , obviously.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

8 years

Makes one think twice about the wisdom of having people live forever, eh @dw2 ? #transhumanism

Ben Riley-Smith

@benrileysmith

8 years

HOW AGES VOTED (YouGov poll) 18-24: 75% Remain 25-49: 56% Remain 50-64: 44% Remain 65+: 39% Remain #EUref

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Academic life is justifiably rejected by so many people these days -- including those trained in it -- because we're just reproducing the worst features of medievalism: i.e. no one speaks for themselves, they just channel others. #Liberalism

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

I've always thought that all this 'Plato v Aristotle' business, which frames so much of how the history of philosophy is still taught, has been really about Augustine v Aquinas in the struggle for the soul of Christendom.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Religious #faith needs to rebrand itself as being anti-certainty. I'm always struck by how people come to faith through a need for certainty. In fact, faith is about thriving in the face of uncertainty, knowing that there is meaning in the end, to which your actions contribute.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

An educated person in the West understands that we're much less like the ancient Greeks than we might think and much more like the medieval Christians than we might like.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

The success of the #Humboldtian university lay in its destruction of past scholasticism, not its creation of present-day scholasticism, aka disciplinary specialisation. The #NextHumboldt will need to figure out how to reinvent the university without reinventing scholasticism.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

There's no need to mystify #lecturing in order to defend it. True, most lectures are lip syncing to Powerpoints and AI will replace them. But students actually need to hear people capable of verbally integrating new knowledge in a reasonably accessible way. That's the baseline.

Phil Baty

@Phil_Baty

5 years

Great debate on the “death of the lecture” on my timeline. Does the lecture work? What do you think? The lecture is an invitation to slow down and think differently via @timeshighered

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

The cover of my next book. It will make a great stocking stuffer!

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

Only academics believe in a gap between 'science' & 'politics' that needs to be bridged. Everyone else wants to know how to distinguish them

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

No matter how much you know about someone, it's always best to treat them as mysterious.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 months

You can tell when a university has lost its moral and epistemic compass when marking is treated more seriously than teaching.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 months

The main reason that it's difficult to review academic books 'in their entirety' is that they're mostly literature reviews, which are pretty damn boring, especially if you're at least as literate as the author.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

I just heard a lecture by @drtimthornton in which he said: 'Philosophy doesn't tell you what you should think but tells you the cost of thinking what you want to think'. That's a very good line. Is it original?

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

A good question for a student evaluation form: To what extent did the lecturer tell you stuff that you did not already know?

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Just found this photo from three years ago from some panel in St Petersburg, where I seemed somewhat skeptical of what I was hearing...

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Logical positivism's great meta-level error was to think that making language more exact would make it less emotional.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

1 year

Here I am in Beijing earlier today being presented with the Chinese edition of my #SocialEpistemology by Yaxin Yao, who has translated 4 of my books and several articles.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Half of why academic writing is so complex is that you must present your own thinking as the rethinking of other people's thoughts. The other half -- if there is one -- is that you're actually saying something complex.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Righteous indignation can make people appear smarter and more powerful than they really are. I sometimes think it's designed to distract from weakness, often at multiple levels.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

For anyone trying to make a difference, being wrong is always better than being trivial. The former forces further action whereas the latter does not.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

8 years

Top tip for life: If you read widely and deeply when you're young, everything you read later will appear hyperlinked with your own mind.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

When academics converge on a position, it's dignified as 'consensus'. When non-academics do it, it's condemned as the 'herd'. Go figure.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

A distinctive feature of how I do research is that I'm more interested in understanding why someone makes a particular knowledge claim than whether it is true. Knowing the truth too easily can shut down the search for deeper truths.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Scientifically speaking, a promise is a hypothesis waiting to be broken.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

I understand that there are obstacles to non-whites getting ahead in a white world but what I don't get is why it's due to 'white privilege'

Matt Beard

@matthewtbeard

7 years

@ProfSteveFuller So if you believe it exists, it exists primarily as a way the world engages with you; not how you engage with the world 2/

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

If you don't know how the #data is gathered and coded, it is unclear what #statistics mean, even if you know what exponential functions are.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

When evaluating people's lives, we need to distinguish those who stick to the same position regardless of criticism, and those who change in their own way, obliquely responsive to criticism but without losing their own plot. The former is dogmatism, the latter autonomy.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

One of the great insights of #MaxWeber was that the priests effectively destroy the prophets after their death by routinizing the prophet's charisma. In today's terms: the problem with the 'cult of genius' is not the 'genius' part but the 'cult' part.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

7 years

Academics are #PostTruth creatures by nature: They rarely say what they believe to be true. They generally say what they find defensible.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

@evgenymorozov What, no Cass Sunstein?

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Those who insist on a strong distinction between reason and emotion overestimate the epistemic value of operating without affect. #PostTruth

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

The more I read both #Deleuze and Deleuze commentary, the more I believe that with guys like him in the Franco-German world, it's just best to know Western philosophy and history and read them without the commentators. You avoid the 'mystery' that commentators often introduce.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

What got me interested in #Popper 's philosophy was not anything I was taught about him but how he was demonized by academic philosophers, which led me to look into him myself. As #Feyerabend said, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

I've always thought that when philosophers and intellectual historians group certain thinkers as belonging to a 'school of thought', they're doing what Dante did when he put people in various circles of Hell.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

6 years

Neither. A lecturer ought to provide students with a personal example of how to communicate knowledge effectively and responsibly. The day the lecturer goes, the university can officially become a distributed network of largely self-taught seminars managed by short-term staff.

Phil Baty

@Phil_Baty

6 years

Lecturers: your role now is to help students manage information rather than pass on knowledge. Agree?

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

2 years

Unless universities plan to breed academics, which some seem to want to do, we simply need to admit that family life and academic life are incompatible in any win-win way because their values are fundamentally different.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

4 years

Y'know, this nonsense could be stopped if academics stopped using citations as evaluative measures. But that's a little too sophisticated for academics to figure out...

Times Higher Education

@timeshighered

4 years

Citation gaming ‘increasingly sophisticated’: report from @webofscience owners says that universities may need to do more to monitor research integrity

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

The great lesson of academic Marxism is that you can turn the critique of capitalism into intellectual real estate without affecting real world capitalism -- just as the logic of capital would predict!

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

5 years

If you want to empower students, give them a high mark but then feel free to vent all the problems you have with their work. That shows respect. Unfortunately, academics tend to do the passive aggressive thing of marking low but saying how wonderful the student was trying to be.

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Steve Fuller

@ProfSteveFuller

3 years

Advice to the young: If you're thinking about becoming an #academic , please be driven by a troubling problem that can't be solved in a normal job. Otherwise, you might just turn out to be a mystified parasite who exacerbates the problem that originally concerned you.

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