I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on László Bernáth and János Tözsér’s “Pyrrhonian Skepticism about Philosophy" (Tözsér and Bernáth 2026), as I am an admirer of their collaborative work on metaphilosophical equilibrism (Bernáth and Tözsér 2026) and Tözsér’s earlier monograph on skeptical metaphilosophy (Tőzsér 2023). While I am sympathetic with their program in broad description, in that I also am a metaphilosophical skeptic (Aikin 2026), there is some distance between my view and theirs on some details.

Nietzsche is undoubtedly the philosopher who has most captivated transhumanist thinkers, largely due to his concept of Übermensch, which in the early twentieth century came into common English as ‘Superman’, gradually incorporating all the mythic connotations that the word still holds. However, as Walter Kaufmann pointed out in the 1950s, a better English rendering of Nietzsche’s concept is ‘Overman’. Not only is ‘Overman’ truer to the original German, but it also better captures the alienating nature of the concept, since the Nietzschean ‘Overman’ is not simply a better version of the human—which ‘Superman’ seems to imply—but somehow rising above the human while at the same time putting an end to it.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s “Verification Is a Commons” improves the Verification Collapse Cascade (VCC) by forcing three clarifications. His distinction between replacement and accumulation narrows the use of model-collapse results. His public-good analysis shows how individually rational non-verification reflects a failure of provision while verification retains collective value. His distinction between agency in operation and agency in aetiology also sharpens the original claim: a cascade runs without requiring a present intentional distorter even when earlier institutional choices helped produce the conditions in which it runs.

Let me begin by thanking Moti Mizrahi for his thoughtful and supportive review of my (2026) book, which I very much appreciate. Mizrahi’s review of the book and the points he brings up are very congenial to my own way of thinking about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), so in a way it is a little hard to respond to the review.

Volume 15, Issue 9, 1–96, September 2026 ❧ Seddon, Robert. 2026. “Maintenance and Curation: A Reply to Theunissen.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (9): 1–7. ❧ Russo, Federica. 2026. “How to Realise the Promise of Evidence-Based Approaches? Insights from Reflexive Policing.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (9): 8–14. ❧ Broncano-Berrocal, Fernando. 2026. “Caring for Questions: Inquiry, Epistemic Paternalism, and the Attention Economy.”

Cristóbal Bellolio’s commentary (2026) on my “Making Sense of Science Denialism” (Billon 2026a) is the kind of reply one hopes for: generous, precise and constructive. Three of his four points call, I believe, for acceptance with refinement; one calls for argued resistance. I will take them in order: his moral sharpening of the denialism/conspiracism distinction (§1), his challenge from the “oppositional” model of epistemic populism (§2), his reframing of the objectivity question around a plebeian standpoint (§3), and, at greatest length, the question he explicitly puts to me: what to make of Rousseau (§4)?

Mohammad Ostadi, an Iranian journalist, first contacted Steve Fuller in August 2025 to conduct an interview as part of a series on ‘global thinkers’ to be published in Quds Online (www.qudsonline.ir).The thinkers covered have ranged from Peter Singer to Isabel Allende. In Fuller’s case, it was occasioned by the publication of Science: The Art of Living in Persian by Goman Publishing.

In the first part (Wills 2026) of this series, we discussed the political ‘Gnosticism’ of various right-wing trends prevalent on social media. We defined ‘political Gnosticism’ as a cultural stance involving rituals of purity and separation and the sense of belonging to an ‘elect’ under constant threat of erasure. One element of this phenomenon was defined as ‘theocratic’ though the ‘theocracy’ in question was not one easily assimilated to historic Christianity.

Jason Brennan (2026) devoted his latest SERRC post to my paper “Political Debate under Epistemic Asymmetries” (2026), for which I thank him warmly. In a careful reading, he identifies several theoretical problems and doubts, as well as practical implications of my position that could prove troublesome, for which I am also grateful to him. I believe that most of the shortcomings he identifies are the result of things I left unsaid.

What is the purpose of science? Who is science for? And why conduct scientific research at all? Though she does not explicitly state so, Gwen Ottinger aptly addresses these substantial questions in her new book The Science of Repair: How People Who Believe in Facts Can Build a Better Future (2026). Her underlying argument exposes the paradoxical relationship between community-engaged science and the quest for environmental justice: often, science undertaken with the goal of working toward environmental justice ends up reinforcing said injustices.

The publication of Science in the Face of the Post-Truth Condition: The Challenge of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology (2026), by Francis Remedios, represents a significant contribution to the contemporary debate on the post-truth condition. Its importance lies in offering a coherent reconstruction of Steve Fuller’s thought and situating it within the major discussions in the philosophy of science, social epistemology, and science, technology, and society studies.

Should epistemic systems different from so-called “Western” science, particularly when they are associated to Indigenous peoples who have suffered for centuries the consequences of colonialism and oppression, be preserved, even taught in “Western” academic institutions? Is such a preservation a way to overcome epistemic injustice and “epistemicide?” Or (quite the opposite) should we consider science a spectacular achievement of our species, of which everyone (Indigenous or not) should equally benefit?

Abstract Sheldon Richmond in “Revolutions in Mathematics: A Surd Fantasy?—In Part” (2026) poses a simple question and presents a clear answer. He concludes that revolutions occur in the history of mathematics from the antiquity to the present day. He adds, however, a proviso which seems to me to be the most crucial point in his article, that mathematics is a continuum in terms of how proofs work.

In “Epistemic Paternalism and Protective Authority in a Non-Ideal World,” Pedro Schmechtig (2025) defends a virtue-based account of the justification of epistemic paternalism, which he characterizes as the intentional and significant interference with another person’s inquiry, without their consent or consultation, for the sake of their intellectual well-being or flourishing. His starting point is the familiar objection that such interference is unjustified because its non-consensual and non-consultative character is disrespectful and unfair: it violates the paternalised subject’s personal sovereignty and, in the epistemic case, their…

If not on evidence, “What on earth was medicine based before?”—this is a famous quote from John Worrall’s (2002) influential paper, which in many ways paved the way for a systematic philosophical discussion of the foundations of medicine and of medical methodology. It has been over 20 years since the publication of this paper, and the same question can be repeated for any field that, at some point in time, has had an ‘evidence-based turn’.

Maintenance, as a topic of philosophical interest, is enjoying something of a heyday. The focus is often on technological or engineering contexts; a special interest group within the Society for Philosophy and Technology has been holding talks on maintenance since 2022.[1] Mark Theunissen’s paper (2025) ultimately returns to this terrain, and to examples like the maintenance of the Golden Gate Bridge (313), but with lessons learnt by exploring maintenance in a different context: how curators maintain items in museums’ collections.

Volume 15, Issue 8, 1–95, August 2026 ❧ Yamada, Kenji. 2026. “Truth Without Liars: The Verification Collapse Cascade—A Response to the Post-Truth Consensus.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (8): 1–9. ❧ Mizrahi, Moti. 2026. “Can’t Truss It (Epistemically): A Reply to Hauswald.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (8): 10–18. ❧ Orlowski, Eric J. W. 2026. “Leaving the Machine Running: Posthuman Ethics and the Politics of Technology.” …

A Pronoun at the Post Office The following exchange happens to me, with small variations, almost every time I ask for information at a post office or a hospital: Citizen: “Mi perdoni. Avrei bisogno d’una informazione.” (“Excuse me. I need some information.”—uses the formal Lei.) Clerk: “Dica pure.” (“How can I help you?”—polite, yet professionally detached; uses the formal Lei.)

Fred is a professional philosopher who comes to think a specific philosophical claim C is true—even though there is significant disagreement in philosophy over C’s truth-value. To a first approximation, László Bernáth and János Tőzsér’s main thesis, BT, is that philosophers in Fred’s position “should suspend belief in any proposition about which there is a robust (long-standing and well-tested) disagreement” (2026, 30).

Abstract This note closes my side of an exchange over Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics. It concedes four points of formulation and implication, checks two disputed attributions against the published record and the book’s own text, and restates genre discipline as the local application of a broader norm of assertion. The last word is left to Dr. 

A fairly standard definition of “Socialism”: socialism /sō′shə-lĭz″əm/ noun 1st Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy. 2nd The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which the means of production are collectively owned but a completely classless society has not yet been achieved.

I greatly enjoyed Alexandre Billon’s “Making Sense of Science Denialism: Epistemic Populism and the Demand for Autonomy and Inclusion” (2026) on the distinction between scientific denialism and conspiracism—a distinction that is often overlooked by academics and routinely treated in public debate as little more than a symptom of ignorance or irrationality. Applying the principle of interpretive charity, Billon argues that at least one of these phenomena—denialism—can be understood as a reasonable reaction by laypeople who feel belittled and patronized by arrogant scientific elites, whose language has become increasingly unintelligible to the epistemic sensibilities of ordinary citizens.

Alexios Stamatiadis-Bréhier (2026) has provided the study of meta-conspiracy theorising with its first genuinely systematic architecture.[1] By proposing an ordinal hierarchy of conspiracies about conspiracy theories, a taxonomy of their scopes, and a supertask objection to their endless proliferation, his framework imposes welcome order on a historically tangled literature. … . Article Citation: West, Mark D. 2026. “Sedation and Discharge: A Reply to Stamatiadis-Bréhier on Meta-Conspiracy Theorising.” …

In the following essay, Shawn Wilson, Anna Lydia Svalastog, Lindsay DuPré-Fiddler, Melissa Shouting, and Neha Raj Singh, in addition to individual graduate students (and with reference to graduate student experiences), respond to Maud Woiczik’ s article—“Can One Grieve a Way of Knowing? Introducing Epistemological Grief”—published on 13 May 2026.[1] … . Article Citation: Wilson, Shawn, Anna Lydia Svalastog, Lindsay DuPré-Fiddler, Melissa Shouting, and Neha Raj Singh.

Abstract Jacob Vangeest (2026) shows why posthuman ethics requires humanity to withdraw from ethical oversight; I argue that, in contemporary technopolitical practice, such withdrawal risks becoming abdication, as imaginaries around transhumanism and artificial superintelligence relocate political responsibility into the very technologies through which the posthuman is imagined. … . Article Citation: Orlowski, Eric J. W. 2026. “Leaving the Machine Running: Posthuman Ethics and the Politics of Technology.” …