•  732
    Page, text and screen in the university: Revisiting the Illich hypothesis
    with Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 50 (1): 49-60. 2018.
    In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies play…Read more
  •  566
    In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overco…Read more
  •  551
    This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt's concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt's anti-individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt's framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the conditi…Read more
  •  551
    This article brings forth a new perspective concerning the relation between stupidity and thinking by proposing to conceptualise the state of non-thinking in two different ways, situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum of thinking. Two conceptualisations of stupidity are discussed, one critical which follows a French line of continental thinkers, and the other one which will be called educational or ascetic, following the work of Agamben. The critical approach is…Read more
  •  429
    ‘Why aren’t you taking any notes?’ On note-taking as a collective gesture
    with Sean Sturm
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 1-8. 2020.
    The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the live event…Read more
  •  401
    How to Think Critically about the Common Past? On the Feeling of Communism Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary Romania
    The Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series 68 (2): 57-71. 2019.
    This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, n…Read more
  •  398
    The moral source of collective irrationality during COVID-19 vaccination campaigns
    with Cristina Voinea and Constantin Vică
    Philosophical Psychology (5): 949-968. 2023.
    Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the collective irrationality of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as partisanship and ideology, exposure to misinformation and conspiracy theories or the effectiveness of public messaging. This paper presents a complementary explanation to epistemic accounts of collective irrationality, focusing on the moral reasons underlying people’s decisions regarding vaccination. We argue that the moralization of COVID-19 risk mitigation measures contributed to t…Read more
  •  382
    The main research question that this paper aims to answer is: ‘In what does today’s attack on humanities consist and how can humanities be defended?’ In order to answer this research question, one needs first to describe how the humanities have argued for their usefulness before the Bologna Process; second, provide reasons for the claim that the Bologna Process would be a new type of attack; and third, analyse the new defences for the humanities, so as to discuss whether these are suitable. Th…Read more
  •  345
    As attention to the pervasiveness and severity of environmental challenges grows, technical universities are responding to the need to include environmental topics in engineering curricula and to equip engineering students, without training in ethics, to understand and respond to the complex social and normative demands of these issues. But as compared to other areas of engineering ethics education, environmental ethics has received very little attention. This article aims to address this lack a…Read more
  •  329
    Self-trust and critical thinking online: a relational account
    with Samantha Marie Copeland
    Social Epistemology. 2022.
    An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical t…Read more
  •  303
    The Appeal to Expert Opinion in Contexts of Political Deliberation and the Problem of Group Bias
    Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series 62 (2): 91-106. 2013.
    In this paper, I will try to answer the question: How are we supposed to assess the expert’s opinion in an argument from the position of an outsider to the specialized field? by placing it in the larger context of the political status of epistemic authority. In order to do this I will first sketch the actual debate around the problem of expertise in a democracy and relate this to the issue of the status of science in society. Secondly, I will review how Douglas Walton’s pragma-dialectical approa…Read more
  •  298
    The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes o…Read more
  •  294
    ‘Why aren’t you taking any notes?’ On note-taking as a collective gesture
    with Sean Sturm
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 53 (13): 1399-1406. 2021.
    The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the live event…Read more
  •  288
    This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe a…Read more
  •  282
    This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach developed at TU Delft is deeply informed by the research of the Section, which is centered around Responsible Research and Innovation, Design for Values, and…Read more
  •  275
    This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast t…Read more
  •  274
    This paper aims to reconstruct a possible answer to the classical Newman’s objection which has been used countless times to argue against structural realism. The reconstruction starts from the new strand of structural realism – informational structural realism – authored by Luciano Floridi. Newman’s objection had previously stated that all propositions which comprise the mathematical structures are merely trivial truths and can be instantiated by multiple models. This paper examines whether info…Read more
  •  259
    Notes on note-making: Introduction
    with Sean Sturm and Joris Vlieghe
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 13 (13): 1316-1320. 2021.
    This special issue aims to explore what is educational in the seemingly humble gesture of making notes: not only how and why the practice of note-taking is educative in and of itself, but also what it says about education as such. The contributions to the issue each highlight different aspects of note-making and approach it differently, but all assume that note-making is an educational practice that merits philosophical study. Interestingly, they mostly focus on note-making as a non-digital prac…Read more
  •  239
    Twisted thinking: Technology, values and critical thinking
    Prometheus. Critical Studies in Innovation 38 (1): 124-140. 2022.
    Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the critical scrutiny of values. We will argue that we need critical thinking that focuses on values instead of taking them as unexamined starting points. In…Read more
  •  230
    In this article I investigate online misinformation from a media philosophy perspective. I, thus move away from the debate focused on the semantic content, concerned with what is true or not about misinformation. I argue rather that online misinformation is the effect of an informational climate promoted by user micro-behaviours such as liking, sharing, and posting. Misinformation online is explained as the effect of an informational environment saturated with and shaped by techno-images in whic…Read more
  •  226
    New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of tec…Read more
  •  226
    Through a telescreen darkly
    In Ezio Di Nucci & Stefan Storrie (eds.), 1984 and philosophy, is resistance futile?, Open Court. pp. 187-198. 2018.
    “It was a peculiarly beautiful book. its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. . . . Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession. The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labo…Read more
  •  226
    One of the purposes of the Bologna Process was to facilitate the construction of a Europe of Knowledge through educational governance, yet it fails to reach its purpose because of several unexplained assumptions that undermine the conceptual standing of the whole project; it is the purpose of this paper to bring these assumptions to light. A knowledge economy cannot exist without the knowledge workers which were previously formed in educational institutions, therefore the project for a Europe of…Read more
  •  214
    This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle ins…Read more
  •  211
    Schiță pentru o posibilă filosofie a digitalului
    Revista de Filosofie (Romania) 63 (5): 571-582. 2016.
    This article aims to develop the outline of a possible philosophy of the digital, as a proper philosophy with its own domain, questions, methods and own theories. The article starts by describing the crisis of liniar thinking undersood, following Vilém Flusser, as as a crisis of historical-causal thinking. Then the digital thinking is described as a new way of thinking which aims to become the dominant way of scientific explanation of our times, by replacing historical-causal explanations with n…Read more
  •  206
    University Lecturing as a Technique of Collective Imagination
    In Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe & Piotr Zamojski (eds.), Post-critical Perspectives on Higher Education, . pp. 73-82. 2020.
    Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its best, the univer…Read more
  •  205
    Tunnel Vision
    In Laboratory for Society and Education (ed.), Sketching a Place for Education in Times of Learning, Springer. pp. 91-94. 2018.
    When Wittgenstein was young, he wrote a small book intended to solve all of philosophy’s problems with language, called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). As an intellectual piece, the Tractatus is a strange beast, written by a student with the voice of a professor. Its process of creation resembles that of a fictional piece: the author is struck by inspiration, labours in solitude, and then translates the vision onto paper. Yet the Tractatus was not meant to be a work of fiction, rather to …Read more
  •  195
    Universitatea şi problema proprietăţii intelectuale
    In Constantin Stoenescu (ed.), Etica cercetării şi proprietatea intelectuală, Editura Universitatii Din Bucuresti. pp. 125-152. 2014.
    În studiul Laviniei Marin, Universitatea şi problema proprietăţii intelectuale, este discutată problema actuală a tipului de universitate pe care îl presupune noua economie a cunoaşterii. Pornind de la interesul pentru cuantificarea performanţelor universităţilor şi stabilirea de ierarhii, autoarea ajunge la unele teme epistemologice privind reportul dintre cunoaşterea teoretică şi cunoaşterea practică şi cel dintre cunoaşterea explicită şi cunoaşterea tacită într-o societate în care însăşi cuno…Read more
  •  190
    Fostering responsible anticipation in engineering ethics education
    European Journal of Engineering Education 49 (2): 283-298. 2023.
    It is crucial for engineers to anticipate the socio-ethical impacts of emerging technologies. Such acts of anticipation are thoroughly normative and should be cultivated in engineering ethics education. In this paper we ask: ‘ how do we anticipate the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies responsibly? ’ And ‘ how can such responsible anticipation be taught? ’ We o ff er a conceptual answer, building upon the framework of Responsible Innovation and its four core practices: anticipati…Read more
  •  187
    Moral (or ethical) sensitivity is widely viewed as a foundational learning goal in engineering ethics education. We have argued in this paper is that this view of moral sensitivity cannot be readily transported from the nursing context to the engineering context on the basis of a care-analogy. The particularized care characteristic of the nursing context is decisively different from the generalized and universalized forms of care characteristic of the engineering context. Through a focus on ca…Read more