This article pursues an antihermeneutic conception of Socratic irony that troubles the borders between pedagogical authority and humility. One of the most tenacious ways of troping the teacher-student relation, Socratic irony is often figured as a way for a masterful teacher to exercise authority over a student. Drawing on the writings of Søren…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

Discussion of the relationship between historical conditions and aesthetic form in Euripidean tragedy.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

No doubt, corruption is one of Nigeria’s biggest socio-political and economic problems today. This paper takes a look at the emerging trend of political corruption in Nigeria which is Corruption With Tribal Marks. Using Peter Ekeh’s conception of the “Two Publics” in Africa, the author argues it will be difficult to fight corruption with the pre…[Read more]

In this chapter I will, first, discuss the marriage of Christian theology and Neoplatonism which takes place in the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and some of the problems which arise from this remarkably fruitful liaison. Then, second, I will trace the line of descent which leads from Dionysius to Žižek, who takes this i…[Read more]

The Communism of Thought takes as its point of departure a passage in a letter from Dionys Mascolo to Gilles Deleuze: “I have called this communism of thought in the past. And I placed it under the auspices of Hölderlin, who may have only fled thought because he was unable to live it: ‘The life of the spirit between friends, the thoughts that form…[Read more]

What is a problem? What’s asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem—by way of its impulsion. Of Learned Ignorance is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in a word, is where problems become a problem. Of Learned Ign…[Read more]

What is philosophy? That’s a good question—not because there’s no answer, but because what’s involved in posing it points up something essential to philosophy. In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza sets out what’s required by a definition. A circle, a typical definition might run, is a figure in which all lines drawn fro…[Read more]

In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an *Ansatzpunkt,* as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remaind…[Read more]

Roger Scruton is dismissed by those who do not care to study him as a conservative philosopher. This review shows how Scruton is in fact more a theologian than a philosopher. This review is contrarian in tone to the reviews of Scruton to be found online and restores him as the rightful heir to theologians like Barth, Bultmann etc.

This review speaks highly of Susan Neiman but laments her lack of fuller treatment of Martin Heidegger. Neiman shines in this book and unfortunately thinks her history as an alternative history whereas this review sees her work as a more authentic response to the historical contingencies of the 20th century.

Understanding time is crucial to understanding literature. This essay attempts to interrogate Western concepts of time and in the process makes explicit its collusion with both colonialism and the Protestant work ethic. This is in contrast to Eastern, especially Hindu concepts of time.

Thomas Hobbes has been hailed as the philosopher of power par excellence; however, I demonstrate that Hobbes’s conceptualization of political power is not stable across his texts. Once the distinction is made between the authorized and the effective power of the sovereign, it is no longer sufficient simply to defend a doctrine of the authorized p…[Read more]

The concept of imperium is central to Spinoza’s political philosophy. Imperium denotes authority to rule, or sovereignty. By extension, it also denotes the political order structured by that sovereignty, or in other words, the state. Spinoza argues that reason recommends that we live in a state, and indeed, humans are hardly ever outside a state.…[Read more]

Hobbes’s science of politics rests on a dual analysis of human beings: humans as complex material bodies in a network of mechanical forces, prone to passions and irrationality; and humans as subjects of right and obligation, morally exhortable by appeal to the standards of reason. The science of politics proposes an absolutist model of politics. I…[Read more]

Negri celebrates a conception of democracy in which the concrete powers of individual humans are not alienated away, but rather are added together: this is a democracy of the multitude. But how can the multitude act without alienating anyone’s power? To answer this difficulty, Negri explicitly appeals to Spinoza. Nonetheless, in this paper, I a…[Read more]

This paper offers an explanation of how phenomenology can be used to provide a solution to the so-called paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction asks: how is it that we have a real emotional response to fictional characters or situations when we do not believe that these characters or situations actually exist? This paper will attempt an answer…[Read more]

This paper is part of a workshop with Donald A. Landes on his book Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. It summarises the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, and Landes’ take on these, before offering some critical comments on Landes’ chapter on ‘The Structure of Behaviour’.

winter/spring 2017 issue of ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY, edited and published by David Seamon