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Simon Glendinning

@simonglend.bsky.social
3.3K followers 1.9K following 639 posts

Head of the European Institute and Professor of European Philosophy at LSE.

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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 6h
No such promise. But you’re right to say that where the limits lie is an issue - but this was a “rationalist” thing: you’re not really constrained if the limits are those that are required for living the life of a rational being. Berlin opposed that in relation to an ideal of authenticity.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 7h
I’m not a partisan here but this is not the classic liberal position is it: “You can do whatever you want with no one in your way to stop you.” The classic liberal position is that maximising the freedom of all requires *limiting* the freedom of each. “Equality in freedom” is the watchword, etc.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 8h
I think the “perhaps” is the giveaway. The author seems to sense that actually doing so isn’t obviously the best step to take at this point, politically. I think: obviously nuts. It’s still politically toxic out there and AB clearly wants deliberative politics (we) not debating politics (us/them).
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Do you think Sraffa was implicitly supporting the view that he was summarising here (I do fwiw)?: “The marginal utility of money for a consumer does not change with the variation in the sum spent by him on one among the many commodities he buys.”
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
“It might perhaps be asked…why not now.” QTWTAI…it would be totally insane. It might be asked…how could the author of these words even get to the point of thinking that “perhaps” one might ask that question? Vacuum thinking.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
It may be that this suggestion is very abstract in a problematic way (ie not because of the “it’s not gonna happen” problem): the view which supposes the opposite wrt money is explicitly thought through in relation to a given set of ranked preferences (I think).
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European Movement West London #FBPE #FBPR #RejoinEU @em-westlondon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
EU responds to Burnham “…the UK is welcome to join the customs union or single market via membership of the European Economic Area.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s... www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...
theguardian.com
Macron says ‘welcome back’ to Burnham suggestion UK could rejoin EU
French president, speaking alongside Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez, says EU bid would be good news for UK and Europeans
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The approach assumes that the debate is not one confined to a UK/EU division, but an ongoing question internal to the history of the EU. But yes, it also assumes that this issue cannot simply be bracketed or set aside if the UK is to embark on a rejoin path.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Well…whether “the project” of integration is understood in relation to a vision of “a united Europe of states” or of “a united states of Europe” has long been and remains a key question for UK participation - not just as a UK national preference or “national interest” but a genuinely European one.
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Nils Gilman @nilsgilman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
QOTD: "When politics grows too focused on the near term, it is not just the lives of future people who will suffer, but the democratic commitments of the living." - Jonathan White, IN THE LONG RUN
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I’m robot adjacent.
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LSE European Institute @lse-ei.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Discover the academic career of our very own Head of the European Institute, Simon Glendinning, entering his final of almost 10 years serving as the Head of our Department. @simonglend.bsky.social Full post 👇 🔵 LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... 🟣 Insta www.instagram.com/p/DdTU0lzDtY...
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The fallacy that University leaders pushing AI are falling into is thinking that the point of undergraduate research is to find things out. It isn't. What students find out is typically already generally known. The point of undergraduate research is to learn how to find things out.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
When you split Germany into two the eastern part could be called “Österreich”.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
And yet we barely blink at the fact that the human today anthropomorphises itself without more ado. (The rational animal, the self-conscious animal, the thinking animal, the animal with the capacity for language, the psycho-sexual animal, etc.)
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
My annoying traits are likely inseparable from self-restraint: the lengths I go to not to get annoyed. When I am annoyed, the philosophers I’m annoyed with just find me unintelligible. One of the first things I understood about philosophy: at least half will hate what any other does in its name.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Oh. Substack. It’s…better than this.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I don’t know how different this is - how far do we (in some sense) mimic what you are saying the AI bot mimics? That’s always a good question, I think, when it is supposed they mimic something we do and we (apparently ) don’t. But see above on time…
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Not sure about actual “I”s - but AI have very little grasp of temporality - nothing much beyond before and after - even as something to mimic.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
You can ask an AI bot like Claude why a certain word or phrase is used in the response - just as someone can ask you. Sometimes you won’t know, sometimes you can give an answer of sorts. AI responses are the same. “Where did you get that from?!” - “It just arrived as the right word.”
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Claude knows me as well as most people I talk to. Sometimes surprisingly thoughtful recall of things written previously. Forgot my surname last week and was sorry…
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
A lot of people are responding negatively without reference to any examples whatsoever - it’s an a priori dismissal on the grounds that an AI bot is not a living human being. (Meaning: it has no mind, or no soul, or no intentionality, or no consciousness, or no creativity, or no morality, etc…)
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
There is no way of specifying what is being alluded to when we speak of someone “having an intention” when they say something that does not make reference to an event that has exactly the same structure as what they actually said. Invoking intentionality does not do the work you want it to do here.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I don’t think so. All “artefacts” - text too.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Itself onomatopoeically gross, the constant reference to AI generated text as “slop” is bizarre. Frankly, it says more about the human generated text that uses the word. In any case, AI and human texts (spoken or written) both bubble up from who knows where and both are uncanny and remarkable.
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🌴Jeff🌴 @counseloroh.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
So renaming Lake Ontario is what the "Art of the Deal" moron has decided to do next? America is run by an 80 year old flatulent Orange-painted child, who has no sense of diplomacy, decorum, common sense or shame. What a hideously embarrassing moment in American history.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I don’t mean to limit the term to those who actually try to ground their position through a science. But it seems clear to me that most if not all people properly described as racists will be committed to some kind of genuine objectivity - something that could be demonstrated by a natural science.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
But it’s interesting that lacking a science defines racists in the same way that having one defines, say, biologists.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
There are physicists because there is physics; chemists because there is chemistry; biologists because there is biology. There’s no science of race, but there are people attempting to establish one. These people are racists. Not because they pursue race science. On the contrary: because they don’t.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I don’t know if you are including philosophy as “science” here as something that should be “useful” - I would suggest don’t - but whether it should is a philosophical question not a scientific one. And one of the great philosophical questions in fact surrounds its having no “use” at all…
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Yes I do. But it is a high bar - our best protection from hegemonic authority within the university. And note that I don’t define it as you do. Or rather, I define it according to UK law and you confuse it with the (also massively important) question of university autonomy vis-a-vis external powers.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
No. All research has to comply with a university’s code of research conduct. And in some cases there will be an ethics review before permission to proceed is granted. One can appeal of course. And perhaps AF will be invoked. But if, in the end, it is deemed unacceptable it must not be carried out.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
It’s not a paper on pseudo astronomy! It’s from vol. 2 of my Europe book. Read it. I too have also written against biologistic racism. Of course “gatekeeping” goes on beyond hiring, eg, promotion and peer review. But that is the (always partial) autonomy of the institution, not academic freedom.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I am, btw, openly (in print) sympathetic to a non-Copernican and non-planetary conception of the earth (“the earth does not move”)…. But, but, surely no serious or remotely credible person working in a university today could maintain that kind of view? “It’s just insane!” Imagine if it mattered.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Heidegger was excluded from teaching after the war because of his allegiance to National Socialism - not because he called into question founding ideas and methods in philosophy. (Though, even that case is complicated by the organised actions of self-policing and self-serving bourgeois faculty.)
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The 3 thinkers who’ve been my life in philosophy were all called out by heavyweights as charlatans or sub-standard (Wittgenstein-Heidegger-Derrida) and could have been exceptionally vulnerable without that kind of protection. All 3 challenged a whole conception of philosophy -and were hated/smeared.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Indeed, academics can be fired. But academic freedom protects them from losing their job simply because they challenge dominant ideas and methods - or are thought by powerful gatekeepers not to “meet the standards” expected in their discipline. (The Ed Ref Act 1988 in the UK is explicit on this.)
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Academic institutions are free to hire without having to take anything but their own expertise into consideration in terms of judging merit. But academic freedom concerns the possibility of hired faculty calling into question received ideas within that institution without fear of losing their job.
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Nicolas Chinardet @zefrog.eu · 19/08/2026
After this week's "policy" announcement, helpfully trumpeted by the BBC, this is truer than ever
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Sara Hobolt @sarahobolt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
📢 LSE Political Theory job opening We’re looking for a political theorist to join us at @lsegovernment.bsky.social - it is an open rank search, so we welcome applications at Assistant, Associate or Full Professor level Reach out with questions & please share widely! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...
jobs.lse.ac.uk
Assistant/Associate/Professor in Political Theory
Assistant/Associate/Professor in Political Theory, , <p>&nbsp;</p> <p style="text-align: center;">LSE is committed to building a diverse, equitable and truly inclusive university</p> <p style="margin:...
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I sincerely hope this is widely read. substack.com/@willself1/n...
substack.com
Jason Arday: J'Accuse the British Media
After the death of Jason Arday, Will Self asks what happens when the media machine mistakes what interests the public for the public interest.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
#BBC you are fast undermining your credibility as an impartial and balanced national broadcaster. And you are genuinely becoming a danger to this country. For those who do not know, Richard Sambrook @sambrook.eurosky.social is not some random skeeter. He is a former Director of BBC News.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Does this hold too for the category “socially constructed”? (And so what if it does? Is it a diminution of a category’s worth if it is revealed to have been socially constructed?)
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WestScot @westscot.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
This really cheesed me off this morning. There was no “slight confusion”; NF told a straight-up lie. No wonder so many people no longer engage with BBC News content…
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Alex Andreou @sturdyalex.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Not sure about Joe Pike's analysis of Clacton on BBC News... While technically accurate to say Reform "has had a commanding lead in national opinion polls for much of the past 18 months," isn't it misleading to omit that its numbers have been dropping for months and it is now not even in the lead?
Farage's allies say he has been both emboldened and re-energised by this race, and it is not difficult to work out why.
He is clearly popular in the constituency, his party has had a commanding lead in national opinion polls for much of the past 18 months, and he has achieved something remarkable in turning his upstart organisation into a mass-membership movement with a serious chance of getting into government.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Zizek’s review of the film picks up on something in it that I had sort of noticed but did not appreciate. Worth reading the free bit of it on substack.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
If you are right here, then slop meets more slop, not slop replaces some other kind of (“human”) non-slop output.
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
A good indication of what, today, can rightly pass for “philosophy” - something that (with assistance) can also be produced by Claude. That really should surprise no one. dailynous.com/2026/08/13/p...
dailynous.com
Philosophy Journal Publishes Largely AI-Authored Article — On Purpose (guest post) - Daily Nous
Philosophy & Public Affairs recently---and knowingly---published an article written mostly by Claude, Anthropic's LLM. The article's thesis was supplied by Simon Goldstein, associate professor of phil...
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
If the weather in England this summer was just a year where for once we got really great summer weather I would simply be loving it because I really love great summer weather in England. Unfortunately, while I cannot help loving how it feels - it’s not possible to be happy about how it is…
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Simon Glendinning @simonglend.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I think people’s feeling about Europe were aligned with their beliefs about its direction. That’s why the “ever closer union” clarification would have mattered. The fact that the EU parliament rejected it shows the importance of these vague, beautiful words with no legal standing for any MS at all.
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