Author: lavi
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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…