• The slow diminishment of life on a dying planet and its implications for social theory

• The relational reflexivity of frontier models

• I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me

• Will models fine-tuned to particular domains start consistently outperforming frontier models? Encoding habitus into LLMs

• Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

• Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

• Do I discover the Thing’s glow or do I place it there?

• Why do we want what we want?

• The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

• Heidegger on Lacan: “It seems to me the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist”

• On misidentifying aggregation dynamics as social norms

• The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries

• The objects which haunt us

• An interview with the Studies in Critical Realism podcast

• Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency

• The influence of Kojève on Lacan

• The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

• What do you need to become who you are?

• Internal conversation as a form of object relating

• 🤖 Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency – January 19th, 1pm GMT, Online

• Margaret Archer as heterodox post-Bourdeusian

• A systems sensibility rather than a systems theory

• The late 2020s as the final act of modernity

• 📚Reading the Archers: an intensive summer 2026 reading group

• The jouissance of spleen, or, bitter cold wind whispers my name

• Why we need a better critical theory of LLMs

• Some sociological thoughts on responsible AI

• At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment

• 📣 Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are now available

• 📘 Have you written a PhD using critical realism?

• Is there a middle ground between bourgeois theory and avant-garde theory?

• A thinker lives in the dog’s kennel adjacent to his mind palace

• Hostility to the techno-determinism as intellectual alibi for political and social harms

• Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

• The Covid-19 pandemic as a social mechanism driving biographical change

• Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are

• Chapters abstracts for my new book

• Posthumanism provides an (inadvertent) intellectual foundation for the legal claim of LLM personhood

• A speculative genealogy of accelerationist perspectives

• After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

• Immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy

• Some thoughts on reading Margaret Archer’s work as a unified project

• Some notes on Margaret Archer’s theorising of digital technology

• RIP Michael Burawoy

• The practice of social theory

• Call for Short Papers – One-Day Symposium (The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory)

• The growing popularity of cults in a transient, fragmented state of contemporary society

• CfP: The New Urgency: The Use(lessness) of Theories in Educational Research

• René Girard as reductive Lacanianism

• Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard | Full Length Documentary

• Social ontology matters for how we attribute causality in relation to emerging technologies

• Foucault’s approach to writing

• The misuse of the concept of assemblage within digital social science

• Using reasoning models to support theory-building

• The anxiety of individualisation

• Lacan on the anxiety of love

• New opportunity for independent critical realist researchers

• A sociological rather than psychological notion of susceptibility to being drawn into cults

• Every time you make a decision you confront your symbolic castration

• Hannah Arendt on Benjamin’s thought fragments and pearl diving

• A symptom isn’t a symptom until it’s reflexively recognised as such by the analysand

• What is digital humanism?

• Integrating Christopher Alexander’s design theory into Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach

• Online Critical Realism Discussion Group

• The internet and pluralistic ignorance

• Making the familiar strange

• The cultural politics of AI and the impasse of atomisation

• Disillusioned Awakenings in Dark Times: Reading Bernard Stiegler after the Covid Event

• Reflexivity was always integral to Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology

• The liquidation of significance and symbolic misery

• Hannah Arendt Consortium Launch event Sept 26th and 27th, 2024

• My notes on Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion

• Against Dan McQuillan’s AI realism and for Holly Lewis’s AI realism

• The libidinal economy of symbolisation

• Eudaimonic Bubbles as a normative rather than analytical concept

• 📍Call for blog posts: the Intellectual Legacy of Margaret Archer

• Rest in peace Maggie

• Against an instrumentalist understanding of AI: critical realism and conceptualising artificial intelligence

• A simple way to understand Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach

• Avant-garde theorising is a reflection of the competitive individualism of the academy

• Join us on August 3rd to celebrate the intellectual legacy of Margaret Archer

• Pierpaolo Donati’s relational humanism

• A relational theory of existential challenge

• Our conception of the lifeworld needs the mundane as much as it needs the dramatic

• The unacknowledged debt of Richard Rorty to the ethos of post-war Oxford philosophy

• From foxes and hedgehogs to menders and knockers: Berlin’s other distinction

• The basic sociological problem of artificial intelligence

• How did J. L. Austin’s war time experience shape his theory of performativity?

• In late modernity the signposts established by tradition are now blank

• How to enjoy writing #18: understand where the ideas which influence you come from

• Hegel’s account of the righteous violence of education

• Mapping the many discoures of learning

• Prompt engineering is an expression of cultural capital. Some (critical) notes on Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence book

• Am I a voluntarist about technology?

• Socio-epistemic bubbles as the ubiquitous tacit structures of knowledge production

• Some thoughts on the limitations of critical distance

• Race to the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Sociological Imagination

• Margaret Archer’s last paper: Can Complexity add anything to Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach?

• Capaciousness as a sociological category

• The Nietzschean Midday: Lacanian thoughts on the continual moment of possibility