Steve Fuller on the Soul of the University (Part 1)

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Professor Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. Fuller founded social epistemology as a research programme in the late 1980s, launching the journal Social Epistemology in 1987 and setting out the programme in his book of the same name. He has since written on topics ranging from Thomas Kuhn to science and religion, STS, transhumanism and post-truth. This conversation centres on the university, the subject of his books The Academic Caesar (2016) and Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt (2023). This first part of a two-part conversation is largely historical. It opens with the speech Fuller gave as salutatorian at Columbia in 1979, reprinted in Back to the University’s Future, and the postmodernism he absorbed as a student. He then explains why his chair carries Auguste Comte’s name, and how Comte’s vision of unified knowledge shaped social epistemology. The conversation then turns to the history of the university: why Enlightenment thinkers were hostile to it, and how Wilhelm von Humboldt reinvented it. Fuller traces two paths that followed, Comte’s academics as a secular clergy and the German model of disciplines as fenced-off property, and argues that today’s post-truth condition is a revolt against both. The episode closes on what Fuller calls the soul of the university: the unity of teaching and research in a single person. In part two, we turn to the present-day university and Fuller’s diagnosis and prognosis. We discuss academic rentiership, AI, and what society stands to lose if the Humboldtian ideal disappears. Relevant Links Steve Fuller, University of Warwick Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt (Springer, 2023) The Academic Caesar: University Leadership is Hard (Sage, 2016) Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem, 2018) Media and the Power of Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2025) Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective Note: This conversation was recorded in May, 2026. Episode introduction updated on Nov 2, 2026 for precision, describing Fuller as “a founder” of social epistemology in reference to his institutional role in establishing the field. Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds.  This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme. Music by ComaStudio. Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org