Author: lavi
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The paper that was never written
Every published text (academic paper, story, novel, poem) is built on another text that is buried underneath, an abandoned text. And this is useless in a way, but it’s a sacrifice we must make; papers cannot be created without destroying in the process ideas, abandoning possible paths. The paper that never sees the light of…
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Recognizing LLM-generated ideas
[Image by Circe Denyer from source] Not text, ideas. As peer reviewer, I have been flooded in the last two years with requests to review papers in philosophy which I suspect bear a LLM-heavy influence in their design and interpretation. But how to show this to the journal editors who send these papers out for…
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Writing and reading practices revisited
In my KU Leuven PhD thesis (revised and shortened, available as a book here, On the Possibility of a Digital University: Thinking and mediatic displacement at the university), I wrote about the discovery of writing and reading techniques in the Middle Ages as a revolution that changed how people think and use tools for that.…
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Leadership training in Dutch universities – a whole new world
I’ve recently attended a training workshop for academics, assistant profs transitioning from early to mid-career, about leadership in academia. It reminded me of similar theories I saw in other workshops – I’ve done several of these training before – and of some ideas that circulate informally when people are hired at our university. I keep…
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A House of Dynamite: A Philosophical Thriller
A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow‘s 2025 movie, is a fascinating film for its dramaturgy and showing an eye for details around all things happening in the moment, but also from a philosophical perspective. What makes it stand out is how it shows something new about distributed cognition, political decision-making and sovereignty. The film is…
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Good writing, if you can make it
I recently read a very nice book that I cannot recommend highly enough: “Good Work If You Can Get It. How to Succeed in Academia” by Jason Brennan (2020) It’s written in a witty and funny style but very realistic. The reality behind the academic training programmes (aka the graduate schools) is grim: almost “80,000…
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What makes a philosophical work worth sharing with others?
One of the most feared ones by junior scholars is the following “but is this philosophical work?”. Often used to exclude and to gate-keep newbies, the question touches a painful point. How do we actually know that what we are doing is philosophy and not, say, a mix of literature commentary, with some cultural critique…
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On the Possibility of a Digital University. My first book was just published
I just published my first book: On the Possibility of a Digital University: Thinking and Mediatic Displacement at the University. It is a revised and abridged version of my PhD thesis defended at KU Leuven in 2018 with a beautiful forward written by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons. The book can be found here: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030659752…